


The Other Brooklyn Boy

by aurora_ff



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: 1920s, 1930s, American History, Blind Character, Brooklyn, Bucky Barnes & Steve Rogers Friendship, Bucky Barnes-centric, Captain America: The First Avenger, Childhood, Childhood Memories, Comics/Movie Crossover, Early Aviation, Father-Son Relationship, First Kiss, Gen, Great Depression, Historical References, Hydra (Marvel), Literary References & Allusions, Marvel Comics - Freeform, Not evolving into slash, Oklahoma, Original Character(s), POV Bucky Barnes, Physical Disability, Post-World War I, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Statue of Liberty - Freeform, The Stork Club, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-30
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2018-02-15 11:21:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 28
Words: 48,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2227173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_ff/pseuds/aurora_ff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While overseas in the Allied effort to defeat Nazi Germany, Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes writes letters back home to his family.  His words barely scratch the surface of his experiences.</p><p>  <i>A comic/MCU crossover character study for Bucky Barnes, exploring his childhood while his father was stationed in the mid-west, his transplant to Brooklyn and forming of his friendship with Steve Rogers, and finally his experiences as a Howling Commando. Basically, this is all about James' relationships: the relationship with his father, mother and sisters; the evolving relationship with Steve both as a young man during the Depression and then as comrades post-Project Rebirth. Not as much original plot as my other fics, but something I wanted to do because Captain America: The First Avenger was about Steve. So this is a treatment of CA:TFA from James' perspective.</i></p><p>The first 22 Chapters are a long build with many original characters.</p><p><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/2227173/chapters/5914400">Chapter 23</a> introduces Steve Rogers, for those that would like to jump in the middle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Early November 1943_

_Allied encampment, 107th Infantry Regiment_

_Italian Front_

The air was clear and the sun was shining for once, and Sergeant James Barnes took the rare opportunity to find a place to bask in it, resting up on the angled windshield and the hood of a parked jeep outside of the officers’ command tent. He and his squad cooled their heels in the northern Italian base-camp while the Allied brass planned the next advance. In the past four days, a few new faces with varied accents came and went at almost all hours, gas lanterns burning bright into the night.

As he scaled up to the hood of the drab green vehicle, Barnes stood on tiptoe briefly and looked to the north-east. The Alps in the distance were beautiful, the jutting peaks capped with snow. He would have loved to hike and explore those peaks when he and the world still were pristine; innocence was not to be had in the army's mission here. 

Just over six months of the advancing fighting on the Italian peninsula had taken its toll. He was a bit tired for all his youth of twenty-six, although he never outwardly shared his pessimism with his men. He was nicknamed “Bucky” after all, and Buck needed to always show an example to the others by bucking up and being the strong one. 

With Steve, he was _always_ the strong one to the outsiders. If he wasn’t, Buck feared that his best friend would simply fade away, beaten dead in some alley with no next-of-kin to claim or mourn him. Few saw Steve the way Bucky did. The resilience of Steve’s heart outweighed what his frail body could match by a thousand-fold, and the golden-haired boy blindly and frustratingly imagined the best of others like he expected of himself. 

Buck felt a clasp of tightness in his chest, and with a rumbling cough his lungs expelled a bit more cold and slimy phlegm. He spat it out onto the ground and then settled onto the warm hood, sucking air into his lungs slowly. He knew he should see a nurse or doctor (and there were more than a handful of pretty nurses stationed here), but his men were anxious about the next op with all the military stripes and medals suddenly taking an interest in their particular portion of the front. To be laid up...Nope. Wasn’t going to happen.

He dozed for a while in the sunlight like a barn cat with ears always at parade-rest. The camp was miles from the action, but he’d heard too many stories from Pop about surprise attacks from the enemy. He’d sleep for real when he got back to Brooklyn; he’d been telling himself that for months.

Brooklyn. Yes. While his unit and the various Allied detachments awaited in tents for their orders, something very special had come for him in the military post. He needed to respond that he received it.

Buck pulled out the paper from a pocket in his unbuttoned jacket and a stub of a pencil. Pencils were much more reliable in the field than pens, and he took particular pleasure in sharpening them with his knife. Pop taught him that a dull knife was not only near-useless but a danger. The Victory Mail paper wasn’t so much stationary as a form, already prepped with a place for the address and a circle for the military censor to place his stamp before it got sent to New York City.

The sergeant sat up and turned around to face the clean surface of the jeep’s windshield. He used it as a writer’s desk as one may use a drafting table or an artist’s easel.

God, he hoped Steve was somewhere safe.

Buck began the letter in the block characters that he had inherited from his Pop, preferring that over the school-taught cursive.

_  
Dear Becca,_

_I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to write sooner, so this is a belated Happy Birthday, sis. We’ve been a couple of weeks on the road, marching up to somewhere in northern Italy. (If I tell you anymore, they will be black marks all over this. And if you are reading, Pvt. Censor, Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.) Men on my squad tell me that sugar and white flour are rationed back at home, so I don’t even know if you had a cake. I hope you did._

_You and Mom will be happy to know that the package arrived and the records were not damaged in transport. Not a one. Lieut. Campbell has a player that travels in a case and he and I have teamed up in the past to show the wonder to all the Italian girls we liberate. I don’t know if they like that the music is American or just something new, but I’m not complaining being up till dawn, if you know what I mean._

Rebecca had always kept it quiet when he tip-toed back into the house at three in the morning, lipstick staining his unbuttoned collar and his clothing smelling like cigarettes. Steve was always calling it early, even when he could be persuaded to go out with Bucky after hours to the clubs. And Buck, feeling the guilt now, had just patted a goodbye on his friend's shoulder rather than seeing his best pal back home.

The next words were the hardest, and James was under the impression that he sounded like a broken recording to his folks. With each letter home he wrote the question about Steve in one way or another, hoping that something would get back to his friend without redaction. It was months now, and nothing ever did. He was a bit of a fool for trying after the first three attempts, but Buck could not put his scrap of a blond out of his mind for long. Buck's sister would understand.

The cough came again, but he ignored it in favor of finishing the letter.

_It’s getting on Thanksgiving and Christmas, so whatever Steve is doing for the Allies, I hope he’ll show up back in Brooklyn and have a proper ham or goose with you, Mom, Pop, and the twins. Get him under the mistletoe like you did since you were seven and he was twelve, even if you are taller than him now. You know how he complains and blushes, but everyone needs practice._


	2. Chapter 2

People made assumptions about James, and as a kid he simply played along.

He was not named for the fifteenth president of the United States. His first name was for his father’s best friend (who later died in a field in France), and his middle name was actually his mother’s maiden name. That truth was rather boring, so he made something up instead.

James’ yarn went something like this: _In the spring of 1917, George Barnes, at the birth of his first son, pulled out an encyclopedia with the portraits of all the presidents reproduced on a single page. Unable to decide whether he liked ‘Franklin Pierce Barnes’ or ‘Andrew Johnson Barnes’ better, he closed his eyes and simply named the boy for whatever president his finger landed upon_. Bucky switched up the presidents in the running now and then. ‘Rutherford Birchard Hayes Barnes’ was probably his favorite to say, because it was somewhat like a tongue-twister.

Because of his father’s pride for his country, all the other army brats and their parents were quite certain James’ tale was charmingly true. That was until his father caught wind of the lie and made his son go from family to family to apologize and set the record straight.

“You were not born a swindler’s boy,” Pop admonished. “You’re my _son_ , and what you do reflects upon _me_ as an officer and a man. There will be no more lying, even if it just for fun. Straight shooting from now on, James.”

The boy met eyes with his father, slate-blue to slate-blue, and he nodded. “Yes, Pop. Straight shootin’.” He had his father’s eyes and dark hair, but James had his mother’s hands.

He was as rough-and-tumble as any young boy that spent his early years in a small midwestern town with plenty of wide open spaces, clean air and the dependable income of a staff sergeant to put good meals upon the table and furnish a modest home not so far from the Fort. James played and fought and stood with all the sons of the junior officers at the ceremonies. His father was always with the artillery unit, supervising the salutes from cannons and guns used in the wars past.

As he grew older, James would sometimes sneak out of his bedroom and half-way down the stairs to overhear his father’s and his guests’ conversations around the card table. He was always curious about what adults spoke about when not in the company of children like himself. It was another world to him and a place he could not fully participate in until he himself was a man, which seemed impossibly far away. Still, he liked to listen secretly even though making sense of it was difficult at times. Being able to sound mature and suave gained him reputation in the schoolyard and at the fishing hole and he was quick to adopt whatever he could.

One night, Master Sergeant George Barnes joked to the other NCOs around the game about someone French named ‘Sophie’ that he met while overseas, about how she was a spit-fire and much more willing than the British ladies to ‘give it her all’ when called upon, again and again.

“I loved her the moment I laid hands on her,” Pop reminisced while the other men laughed between their cigars.

James didn’t understand. Pop had married Mom, then Winifred Buchanan, _before_ the war, and marriage was love. Love made little boys and girls, just like him and his baby sister. Why would he need another woman?

“James,” came his mother’s concerned voice behind him, up on top of the darkened stairs. “What are you doing out of bed?” His mother was in her night-robe, her strawberry-blonde hair braided for sleeping.

The boy swallowed. He was probably in trouble.

“I couldn’t sleep,” James said quietly and rose from his seat on the steps before he was summoned. He slowly crept back up the stairs. He felt uneased; he was worried about his father and his mother, which was a child’s way of also worrying about himself. “Mom, who is Sophie?”

The woman gathered her first-born to her side, her fingers lacing briefly through the boy’s hair. “Oh, _Sophie,_ ” his mother sighed. “She was the gun that your father used in the war. Most of the men named their artillery, and she was a French 75. He and his squad fought with her, towed her across half of western Europe by horse-team. He kept her in good shape and knew her and her sisters’ workings almost better than the French that made her. She’s why your dad has the post he has here. He’s helping to design and test something new, something American.”

James felt an instant sense of relief. “So Sophie wasn’t a…?” He knew the word about to come out of his lips was dirty, and it was a horrible thing for a boy his age to say in the company of his _mother_ of all people. “She wasn’t a sweetheart?” 

His mother chuckled. “No, dear. Though I am fairly certain that your father had many, many honeys before me, the stunner and dare-devil that he was. He decided to be something different after the war. Maybe it was the war that _made_ him something different. War changes men, and not always for the worst.”

James just nodded in his mother’s arms and yawned. There were no other boys around to judge him or call him a baby, so he asked. “Mom, if I go back to bed, will you sing me a song to sleep, like you sing to 'Becca?”

His mother’s smile lit up the shadows of the upper floor as the men continued their late-night fraternity. “Always, my son. Always.”


	3. Chapter 3

After school was out for the day, James often went to play baseball with Kenny and Joe, teaming against another few army kids. He also liked to go down to the creek with his Daisy 25 and have at the rusted cans with Tim, Johnny, and Harry. He was the best shot amongst his peers, riddling the tins with BB holes.

Johnny once made the mistake of goading James to try for one of the robins that made its home in the strip of woods where they played. Johnny had a reputation of being unkind to the neighborhood animals.

At first, James just shrugged it off. “That’s stupid.”

“It’s ‘cuz I bet you can’t _do_ it! Cans don’t fly, and if you’re really the best, you can shoot a bird right through its eye,” Johnny taunted.

James stood up and postured, even though he was a few inches shorter and a year younger than his challenger. The other boys got out of the way, speechless. “I’m goin’ home,” he declared, striding forward, only to be blocked by Johnny’s hands pushing him back on his heels.

“You’re such a baby, Jimmy. Your pop killed thousands of Krauts and you can’t even end a dumb animal! You’re not your dad’s; you’re just momma’s bastard from a milkman.” 

Something ugly and savage took James over then, and he tackled his aggressor to the ground. There was instinct and smarts and just enough wrestling with the other boys that James knew how to get the upper-hand. “You want me to kill a dumb animal?!” he shouted from on-top the other boy, ready to land another punch on his stomach or into his ribs. “How ‘bout we start with you?! How about it?!”

And he was just about to begin wailing on Johnny’s face when he caught the terrified look in Tim’s and Harry’s eyes. Like they were expecting James to actually _kill_ the other boy. Biting his lip, James just grabbed Johnny’s collar. 

“You don’t talk about my mother that way ever again. And you don’t come around me no more,” he admonished. “You’re not my friend. If I ever catch you doing something mean to a cat or a dog or a robin or a girl or whatever, I’ll go after you with something better than a BB gun next time. Got it?!”

When James did come back home before his dad was off-duty, his mother knew something was wrong and upsetting him. Maybe it was the slamming of the screen door or the way he stalked into the living room, turned on the radio, and threw himself onto the rug. 

Mrs. Barnes followed and set little Rebecca down on the floor, who immediately flocked to her brother. He pushed his gun away from his sister’s reach without a second thought, hugged her, and brought her to his lap.

“What happened, dear?” Mom asked, drying her hands better on her apron.

At first James was reluctant to say, because he didn’t wasn’t certain whether he really was a ‘Momma’s-boy’ or a ‘cry-baby’ or one of the other different insults children lobbed at each other in their tiny wars. Rebecca was giggling _'Wheeee!'_ and crawling up on him in a way that asked him to once-again throw her up on his shoulders and spin her, round and round, innocently unconcerned to her brother’s plight.

“Johnny wanted me to shoot a robin, and I said no. Then he started calling names and I got angry.” James clenched his jaw. “Mom, I beat him, and it’s going to get back to Pop...”

“It won’t, dear. Don’t worry.”

He looked at his mother with suspicion. 

“Boys like Johnny don’t go running to their folks to admit they are bested. He’s been around the house enough, I know,” his mother said with certainty.

James just felt confused. Winifred must have read the look on his face, because she kneeled and her bleach-scented hands wrapped around both of her children, the younger in the arms of the older and them both in the arms of her.

“My son, a great leader once said that a man’s character can be judged not by his friendships with those who serve his ambitions but by how he treats those who can do nothing for him. Your heart was in a good place and now you won’t have to worry about John Peterson much again.” His mother was from a great city far to the East, where the people were sophisticated and wise. She knew things her husband didn’t, for all his experience overseas.

James rubbed the beginning of his tears into his sister’s cotton pinafore. “But what about _Father…_ ” Somehow he was certain his Pop wouldn’t agree with his wife about how James handled it, and in his fears Sergeant George Barnes would find someway to accuse his son of cowardliness, either for refusing to shoot the bird or beating and threatening the boy.

“He doesn’t need to know,” Mom stated, rising to her feet and picking the fussing Rebecca out of her brother’s hold.

A few weeks later, the only rumor around the Fort concerning James’ talent with the air rifle was that he was a natural.

“Keep it up, my boy, and you’ll be a shoe-in for West Point, a shoe-in!” his father said on more than one occasion. James was growing up to be everything his father wanted him to be.


	4. Chapter 4

With his little sister, James’ family felt complete to him; Rebecca was also the unwitting author of his nickname. 

While his mother put away the left-overs from supper and tended to the dishes, James played with the toddler on the living room carpet while the family waited for their followed radio shows to come on in the evening. One of her favorite games is when James would lay on his back and he’d use his feet to vault her up in the air, steadying her outstretched arms with his hands, something he remembered acrobats doing in the circus that came into town. His little sister cackled from her vantage and James stuck his tongue at her and made silly faces.

Rebecca was learning to talk. James pointed to his sister and declared, “You. Rebecca Elizabeth Barnes. ‘Becca. My sister.” Then he pointed to himself. “Me. James Buchanan Barnes. Your brother.” 

His sister stared at him, frowning a little in concentration. “Buh…” She held out her tiny finger to him. “Buh...Bucky!’” The look on her freckled-face was one of triumph.

“‘Bucky’, huh?” James repeated, which was probably a mistake, especially because he found the edges of his mouth pull to a smile. 

A few days after when his playmates came over, they heard his sister call him Bucky. The town attached to the army fort only had a few thousand citizens, but the elementary school already had five boys named James in the third and fourth grade alone, so rather than become ‘Jimmy B’ or ‘Jay’ or ‘Jack’, everyone just adopted ‘Bucky’ for the son of Sergeant George Barnes, including his teachers.

Buck didn’t mind so much, because it set him apart and was a little reminder of his baby sister. His father never called him by his new moniker, but he wasn’t one to change his attitudes about his son or anyone else for that matter.

* * *

In Bucky’s tenth year, the Gardners came to live down the street a few blocks, and with them came the revelation of just how small his hometown and his world really was. 

Lieutenant William Gardner and Mrs. Virginia Gardner had three daughters: Caroline, who was fourteen; Lucy, who was eight, and Pearl; who was just a bit younger than Becca. Lieutenant Gardner was a pilot, an honest-to-goodness aeroplane pilot. The family he brought with him was from Baltimore, which was another big city in the East, just like the one Bucky’s mom grew up in. Mrs. Barnes and Mrs. Gardner became friends shortly, and they would call upon each other in the afternoons to visit. They soon organized a Mahjong club with a few more of the army wives, playing around luncheon before their older children returned from school and their husbands from their duties at the fort. 

Bucky just continued with his after-school gang, anticipating what the summer had in store for him. He was getting really good at marbles, and he even won a few bets. Helping the widow Westin clear her yard had netted him some spending money, and he thought about whether he would wager his earnings on his skill or buy a bit of candy from the corner gas-station. (Some of his earnings got put away in a piggy-bank for a “rainy day” by his parents’ insistence.)

As he passed the Gardner’s house on his way back home, he caught the sound of a piano playing, notes easily passing through the screens and the open windows necessitated by a late-April heat-spell. The music wasn’t some practice piece, nor was it the elegant arrangements he had heard over the radio that was termed classical music. It was lively, cheery, and it made him want to tap his feet. A woman’s high laughter briefly peeled over the cascade of keys.

Bucky paused and was concerned that his mother may be with Mrs. Gardner, having forgotten the time. He shoved his marbles deeper into his pockets and decided to go up the sidewalk to the house and knock on the door. The piano drowned out the noise, so Bucky knocked louder. The playing came to a halt mid-measure and the boy could hear footsteps come towards the front door.

It was Caroline that answered. She pushed open the screen door to greet Bucky. She was dressed in a way that he had never seen anyone clothed, with a straight, sleeveless slip that he guessed was a type of exotic dress that just barely went down to her knees. She was in heels too, and her chestnut hair sported a band with some sort of jaunty feather attached to it. He was pretty certain she was wearing makeup too.

Bucky suddenly wished he remembered to comb his hair; rather than impolitely stare, he just looked down at the boards of the porch.

“Um. Is my mother here?” he managed.

“Oh,” Caroline breathed. “You’re the Barnes’ kid, right?”

Bucky nodded and decided that the gentlemanly thing to do would be to actually look the older girl in the face. He just had a very, very, very long way up to do so. He swallowed.

“Virginia’s over at the Ross’s today with the Mahjong club. She took Pearl with her, so it’s just me and Lu,” she replied, almost uncaringly. Then the girl’s mood changed suddenly. “Hey!” Caroline continued. “Can you dance?”

Did she just call her mother by her _first_ name? To a stranger?

“Uhhhh,” was what came out this time, and suddenly Bucky found himself being half-dragged into the house by his wrist, the screen-door slamming behind him. 

“It’s not the same without a partner. I mean, I can’t just imagine being led by a ghost all the time.”

Caroline brought him into what looked to be a large parlor. There at an upright piano sat Lucy, looking over her shoulder at them both, a tentative smile passing her lips.

“Hello, Bucky,” Lucy offered. Well, at least he wasn’t totally anonymous. Lucy knew him from school, though they never really ever played or studied together because she was two grades behind, and well, a girl.

“That’s _right_ ,” Caroline agreed, as if remembering. Any uncomfortableness he was feeling was completely invisible to the elder of the two sisters. “Have you ever danced the Charleston, Buck?”

He was proud of himself for getting out a full sentence. “My mom has waltzed with me. I used to stand on her toes while she made the steps. I can follow her now.”

Caroline scoffed and turned away for a moment to look at the only audience she had, her younger sister, who still had hands poised on the keys. “You’re too old for that nonsense. You’ve got to _lead._ Here, I’m going to show you. Lu?”

The music started up again with Lucy scanning easily over sheet music as he fingers did what her eyes witnessed. At eight years old, she seemed to him a virtuoso.

“Let’s start with the basic partner step, alright? I'll demonstrate how you should hold me.”

Bucky quickly learned that Caroline did not listen to polite refusals, not when her mind was set on something. While she was self-possessed (which is a term Buck learned much later in life), the eldest of the Gardner sisters was also vivaciously carefree. She was a strangely effective teacher, eager and praising. Perhaps she knew how to spot natural talent passing on the sidewalk from the vantage of her porch.

There is so much that she could fault in Bucky: his slight drawl, his sturdy but plain clothes, the bit of dirt he had under his short nails, most of all his shyness around girls, whom he hadn’t quite figured out what to make of yet. Caroline had a few inches on him, but she didn’t seem to think that it was of any matter at all. In fact, she kicked off the heels only a few minutes into the lesson so they could be closer to the same height. Buck realized then what petite creatures the Gardner girls were, like birds or angels, and he was extra careful not to step on her delicate feet.

Caroline’s boldness invited the boldness in him, and the music was really, really infectious. By the time she had taught him the basic steps and a few kicks and variations, Bucky was beginning to enjoy himself. He felt a little out of breath just like with any good sport. Even Lucy smiled at their antics, turning her head on occasion to watch them. The darting plume on Caroline’s headband was utterly fascinating to him.

Bucky didn’t notice at first when the marbles leaked from his pocket, but then then a half-dozen of them dropped to the floor like so much hail-stones from a midwestern thunderstorm onto the sanded wood. Two rolled under Caroline’s oncoming foot before he could steer her back. He anticipated the slip and how to catch her, his right arm sliding lower around her hip, his left clasping around her bare shoulder and the delicate pillar of her neck. Her little surprised yelp caused Lucy’s fingers to freeze upon the piano.

From the impromptu dip, Caroline’s honey-brown gaze narrowed on his. “A hidden Valentino, aren't you?”

This is when the stars in the moving pictures kissed, and Caroline didn’t hesitate to replay that scenario on her own home stage, her little sister watching on. Bucky had barely even thought about what it was like to flirt with a girl, much less of what do with them when their mouths were on his own. 

His mind didn’t know what to do but his body did, and he clutched the girl just a bit tighter and let his lips crush a little further on hers, daring a brief taste of the stain on Caroline’s lips. He felt dizzy and sweaty, his racing heart sending sudden fireworks through his limbs. In the next moment, his boyish embarrassment and his father’s lessons about honoring superior officers caught up to him. He should of said he was sorry, but he was certain that was a lie.

Bucky barely remembered guiding Caroline into one of the upholstered seats in the parlor before he crouched hurriedly to gather his errant marbles. He knew how many he had in his pocket before the afternoon interlude with the Gardner girls started, and he was damnably three short before he was consumed with his unease. 

“I’m late for supper,” he muttered. “Umm...Miss Lucy, Miss Caroline...thanks for hosting me. If you don’t mind, I will see myself out.” That’s what he’s thought his Mom would want him to say.

Did the girls laugh as he left? He was never really sure.


	5. Chapter 5

Bucky went about the next few days trying to pretend that nothing unusual had happened at the Gardner’s house. He kept his eyes firmly on the sidewalk in front of him as he passed to and from school. He avoided bumping into Lucy at the end of class by simply going directly to the ballfield like many of the other boys; they were able to get a few innings in before the American Legion took it over for their team’s practice.

Buck wanted to join the team when it first started a year ago, but he wasn’t yet twelve. It galled him having to wait yet another two years because the coach, retired Captain Andrews, once said that he had the potential to be a star pitcher. The Boy Scouts wouldn’t take him until he was twelve either, which was another thing both he and his father were anticipating. At least Buck was able to read an old scout manual and have a sense of what he would be practicing eventually and the adventures he would have.

At night, his head on his pillow but not yet drowsy, sometimes Buck wished that he could go to sleep for _years at a time_ , and when he woke up he’d be two years older and able to do the things he was denied now because somewhere it was written that he was born on March 10, 1917 and somewhere else it was written that boys had to be twelve-or-older to join this club or that organization.

Winifred once told her son that he was actually born a month early, that her first-born was so eager to get into the world.

“How do you know I was a month early?” he had inquired.

“Because, dear, there was fireworks when your father and I made you,” Mom responded with a mix of affection, forthrightness and just a tad of mystery.

Buck didn’t know what exactly being ‘made’ entailed other than it happened when two married people did something special together. At least his mother wasn’t making up stories about storks or cabbage patches, like some of the other ladies did when they talked to their children about how they came to be. Maybe it was because Mom was from a big city, just like Caroline and Lucy were.

As he made his way back home in the golden late-afternoon light, his baseball glove in one hand and his lunch pail in the other, Bucky began to whistle. The rhythm and melody of the piano was still in his head, and he could easily close his eyes and see Lucy’s fingers dance over the keys with as much grace as Caroline’s feet moved over the floor. He glanced over his shoulder, and certain that no other boys would see him, he stuttered his step and began an eight-count, just as Caroline coached. He still remembered how to move to the beat, and he smiled to himself even as the idea of going back into the Gardner sisters’ company made him nervy.

“Hi, Ma,” he drawled in way of greeting as he came in through the back kitchen door. Buck hung up his glove on a coat-nail and then dropped his lunch pail on the counter in the kitchen.

“Hey, sweetie,” his mother replied, pausing in her peeling of carrots to wrap one arm around his shoulder and kiss him lightly on the top of his head. Bucky then found his sister, who was playing with blocks on the kitchen floor, and Bucky kissed her on the top of _her_ head. It was their private coming-home ritual, and Bucky still liked it. When he was twelve, he’d figure he’d have to stop on account of being nearly grown-up and expected to act more like a man. It was a sad but necessary thing to give up to become a scout and the post’s lead pitcher, he told himself.

“If you want a snack, the eggs over there in that bowl are hard-boiled,” his mother mentioned with a wave of her knife.

“Thanks, Mom.” Buck took a few and a plate from the cupboards to put the shells on. He also got for himself a cool glass of milk. 

He had just sprinkled a bit of salt on an egg when his mother looked up from her peeling.

“Before you go off to get cleaned up, I want to mention that your Dad and I are going to a concert at the base Friday night. Lieutenant Gardner’s girl, Caroline, has agreed to watch you and Rebecca for the evening.”

Bucky’s throat seized, and he half-sputtered out his snack rather than choke. He snatched the glass of milk immediately to wash down the bits of egg still lodged there.

When he looked up, his mother was frowning. “Are you alright, James?”

“Yeah. I’m fine,” he said, trying to not appear flustered. “But why can’t I just stay here with Becca by ourselves?”

His mother smiled. “Maybe when you are twelve or thirteen. For now, Sergeant Dad and I think it’s best if you are with someone a bit older. Her house also has a telephone that can reach the fort if you need.”

Bucky tried to ignore the fluttering in his stomach. “Okay, Mom. I’ll be good. On my best behavior for the Lieutenant’s daughters.”

Winifred’s smile did not fade. “Of course you will, my boy. Of course.”


	6. Chapter 6

Bucky made sure his twice-a-week bath landed on that Friday afternoon, just hours before he and Becca were due to go to the Gardner’s. There was no reason to dress up, not like he did for church or for the ceremonies at the Fort, but he picked out one of his nicer shirts.

The real fascination for Buck was witnessing his parent’s transformation. His father came downstairs in his dress uniform. The brass buttons, insignia, and medals were polished and proud, and his hat tucked under his arm. Father and son had their rituals too on occasions like this, and as George descended and stepped into the living room, Buck would rise and stand to attention. He saluted the Sergeant, who then saluted back.

“Private Barnes, are you and your sister prepared to depart camp for Fort Gardner?” his father inquired. 

Becca was playing with her crayons, coloring in wide and imprecise strokes onto the images from an old _Sears, Roebuck & Co._ catalog. His little sister propped up one of her dollies next to her, speaking softly in a sing-song way. She could take her toys with her, and Pearl may have other things to share for a while before both of the young children were put to bed.

“Yes, Sir! All is ready!” Bucky reported. His father, satisfied, then placed his own hat on the son’s head. Year by year, it got closer to fitting the boy. Bucky held onto it until they were ready to depart the house.

“Carry on then, Private,” his father pronounced, a fondness evident in his features if not his voice.

* * *

When the Barnes family arrived at the Gardner’s home, the adults exchanged pleasantries while Caroline took charge of him and Becca. The older girl was hardly recognizable to him without her skin-baring dress, heels or makeup. Maybe he was unrecognizable to her, because she seemed to pay him no more mind than one of the framed prints in the foyer. Something to glance over. 

His mother bent to kiss her son on the cheek, of which Buck tried to seem indifferent to in front of the eldest of the Lieutenant's children. He'd suppose he'd should give measure-for-measure in the odd game of pretend-to-be-cool.

“We’ll be back by eleven,” his mother assured. “If you get sleepy, Mrs. Gardiner says you can rest in the guest bedroom until Father and I come and take you and Rebecca home.”

As if _that_ was going to happen. Normally at home, Buck was tucked in by nine at the latest and allowed to keep the lamp near his bed on another half an hour while he read boy’s adventure books or his scout manual. The idea that he could stay up as late as an adult was exciting in and of itself. The only bad thing he anticipated about watching his parents leave with the Gardners was that he was uncertain what Caroline had in store once they were gone to the concert.

Caroline grasped Rebecca’s hand and tried to coax her up the stairs. “Come on, Rebecca! You can meet Pearl and Lucy,” she tried to encourage, but the four-year-old just seemed confused and utterly unwilling to budge.

“Where did Momma go?” Buck’s sister asked, clutching her doll with one arm tightly. 

The older girl faked a smile. “She went with your father to listen to music. Your mother will be back soon. Pearl is a nice girl. Let’s go meet her.” She tugged again at the child’s arm.

“No!” Becca pronounced. “I want to go home!”

Bucky knew that tone and immediately decided he needed to act before a full-on fit ensued. He put himself between the two, saying gently, “Caroline, let her go and let me talk to her.”

That caused the eldest Gardner girl to huff and turn on her heel as soon as she dropped Becca’s hand. She pronounced as she went up the stairs alone, “Wonderful! We’ll be upstairs in the nursery when you are done spoiling your sister!” Caroline’s shoes made a significant stomping noise as she ascended out of sight.

Bucky sighed and just shook his head, guessing who was actually the most spoiled girl under the roof. He knelt in front of his sister, and Becca locked eyes with him.

“Momma?” she asked again, her face screwing as if ready to cry.

“I know you’re scared, Becca. Mom isn’t here and Pop isn’t here,” he acknowledged. “But Big Brother Bucky is here with you. You will _always_ be safe with Big Brother Bucky. Okay?”

Bucky opened his arms inviting her for a hug and Becca leaned into him as she did countless times. She was growing so big, day by day. Soon he wouldn’t be able to carry her until _he_ was much bigger.

“Hey, Sis...which dolly did you bring with you? What’s her name?” he asked, now trying to distract her from her worry. He looked down into her arms. The toy was soft and handmade, with wool-yarn for the light orange hair, an approximation of the color of his sister’s hair, the red-gold the same tone of their mother’s. The doll was missing the Buchanan freckles though.

“Polly,” Becca answered.

“Well, then. How about you and me and Polly _explore?_ It’s a big house. Let’s scout it. I think it’ll be fun.” He pulled back from his sister and gave her his most winning smile, the kind he knew got his mother to always smile back. “Let’s show Polly how to have an adventure. You hold Polly and I’ll hold you.”

“Okay,” the little girl agreed in a soft voice, murmuring something for Polly into the doll’s ear, something that sounded reassuring.

Buck then hoisted her up on his left hip, hooking his arm underneath her legs while she wrapped one arm around his neck. “There we go,” he reassured, then started looking around to the various rooms accessible from the foyer.

A voice came from the landing up the stairs. “You’re very good with your sister.” It was like and unlike Caroline’s. Buck looked up and saw Lucy, already in her white nightclothes and a brocaded sleeping robe. 

Buck felt bold with the need to shield his sister from the oddities that were within this house. “Isn’t your sister with her own?” he challenged.

Lucy shrugged, stepping down the landing in her slippers. “Pearl’s only our half-sister.”

Their _what?!_ Was their baby sister missing two legs or something? ‘Half-sister’ sounded like something grotesque and monstrous. The Gardners were very, very strange.

“Bucky?” his sister implored. He could sense the doubt and fear returning.

Lucy must have read the reaction on his face. Fortunately, she didn’t seem wholly cut of her older sister’s cloth, even though they had the same rich cocoa-brown hair.

“I’ll show you around if you want,” Lucy offered, softly. “It’s not as good as what we had in Baltimore, you know?”

Buck didn’t know. Not at all. His parents told him the family was blessed in their own house to have electricity for the lights and the means to heat a full bath in a boiler. Bucky wasn’t about to let on how much of a mid-western bumpkin he was, but he did privately wonder about how much more officer fly-boys were paid in contrast to gunnery non-com'ed sergeants.

“That’d be swell,” he accepted as he was also circumspect. He then returned his attention to his sister who was already fussing in his arms again, trying to soothe herself some more by talking to her doll. “Lucy will guide us. Hold onto Polly tight. It’s a bit new and scary, but it’ll be fun. And I’ll be with you, Becca. Always.”

This was how Bucky managed that night, at least for the first hour. Maybe it was just a kid’s sort of bravery, the kind that was only there because he cajoled himself out of personal fear for the sake of others. Surely when he turned twelve, he’d have more bravery for his own sake.


	7. Chapter 7

With his little sister in his arms, Bucky followed the eight-year-old Gardner girl as she lead him and his sister around her home in an exploratory tour. The house was about twice the size of the Barnes homestead and decorated in a way that bespoke of old, gentrified wealth. The parlor he already knew from his encounter days ago, but he marveled at the separate dining room with its long walnut table and electrified chandelier. Becca also seemed delighted, reaching up to the ceiling as if she could touch the glowing crystals.

The kitchen was also double the size of his family’s own. “We used to have a live-in maid and cook as well as a governess,” Lucy explained. “Now we just have someone come part-time to help Virginia.”

His curiosity was eating at him. “Why do you keep on calling your mom by her first name?”

At least Lucy was kinder than Caroline, who probably would have scoffed at the ignorant question. “Because Virginia didn’t give birth to me or my sister. Our father remarried after our own mother died.” Lucy seemed just a little sad when she answered, and even though she was two years younger than Bucky, she seemed older in a way.

“Oh,” was all Buck could manage as they returned back to the stairway. They very thought of losing his own mother caused his stomach to clench. He wanted to ask more, the ‘whens’ and the ‘whys’ and the ‘hows’ but he was concerned that Becca would begin to clue into what they were talking about and get upset too. Besides, it probably wasn’t polite.

Buck looked at his sister in his arms who seemed to be a bit drowsy, nesting her head on his shoulder. “Hey, Becca. How about Polly meets Pearl now? Before we settle down for bed?”

“Okay,” Rebecca said, her fist rubbing her eyes.

A grandfather clock began and ended its chime of 8:30 p.m. somewhere in the lower rooms. The tones reminded him of church-bells that pealed at weddings, sounded at baptisms, and rang solemnly at funerals. Buck got a creeping chill up his spine. He felt his hand smooth his sister’s hair.

“The nursery?” Buck inquired to Lucy with the strange word, who nodded. They ascended the stairs much more quietly than Caroline had done before, and the girl walked them past closed rooms and around a corner until they almost the end of the hallway. A crack of light spilled into the passageway and Lucy pushed the half-closed door open.

The three-year old child who was on the nursery’s floor may have only been a ‘half-sister,’ but she wasn’t missing any limbs. Despite Lucy’s assertion that Pearl was not as closely related as she and Caroline were to each other, the toddler had the same rich brown hair as the other two of her siblings. Pearl was on her back, lifting up two wooden toys of carved birds, one in each hand, wings half-swept back. She waved and dipped her arms, weaving them in an imaginary flight of fancy.

As Bucky stepped further into the room, he also noticed Caroline reclining in a rocking chair, flipping through reading that was large and colorful. She hadn’t yet changed into sleeping clothes like her sister, but she also wasn’t transformed into the creature he had been surprised with that first afternoon.

“Miss Caroline,” Buck offered, sliding Rebecca from his arms and down his leg close to Pearl.

The Gardner’s eldest daughter looked up from her magazine. “Glad you could finally come,” she offered casually, her true mood thinly veiled.

Bucky took in a deep sighing breath. His father often spoke of patience. The practice of that virtue was difficult for the boy that he was, but he aspired none-the-less.

“Lucy was kind enough to show me and Becca around,” he countered. “Your family has a nice home.”

“Hm-hmm,” Caroline offered, then immersed herself again in her casual reading, ignoring him. Buck didn’t know what the word _Vogue_ meant on the top of the cover, but he was certain it was something to indicate sophistication. 

He then looked back to his sister, Pearl, and Lucy. The nursery had shelves to organize the toys and games and Buck quickly scanned them, his eyes landing on a box. “May we play with a puzzle, Lucy? We can all work at it, I figure.”

“Sure,” she agreed. As Bucky pulled the box and brought it over to a table sized for young children, Lucy chatted with her younger sister, who left her other toys to pull up a chair. The seats were a bit too small for him, so he just knelt beside them. The four children played at the puzzle for a little while, Buck asking his sister to find the corners and edges. Eventually she got fussy though, yawning, and he set his piece aside. 

“Looks like it’s bedtime for you, Becca-boo,” he said.

Caroline set aside her magazine, finally minding the younger children as she agreed. “Your sister can sleep in the guest bedroom. I’ll show you.” A single glance to Lucy assured that Pearl would go through her bedtime routine.

Buck scooped up his sister and her doll again and followed Caroline now to one of the closed doors on the second floor. Their guest accommodations was more luxurious than his parent’s bedroom at home. He set Rebecca down on the edge of the bed, helping her to remove her shoes. Caroline unearthed one of the pillows.

“Look at this. A big-girl bed for you and Polly,” Buck observed while sitting beside her. “Try the pillow. I think it’s really soft.”

Becca settled in, sighing deeply. Caroline just looked on from the foot of the bed, leaning against one of the carved pillars at the corner; she seemed to be eyeing him, studying him.

“I’ll be downstairs,” he reassured his sister. “Just downstairs. In the morning we’ll both be home.” He then kissed her on her forehead. “The angels know where we sleep, and your angel is right here with you." The two Barnes siblings had been baptized Protestant, but he found his mother's inherited belief more colorful, more suited to calm and reassure. "Goodnight, Becca.” 

“G’night,” his sister returned, nuzzling the pillow and pulling her doll close to her before surrendering herself to slumber.

Buck rose quietly, and met Caroline’s gaze. She went to turn off the lamp next to the bed, but he caught her slender hand and shook his head. In a strange house, the light would be better left on.

The eldest Gardner daughter and he departed the bedroom with a quiet latch of the door. Caroline began walking down the hall and to the stairs. He waited a long moment with his ear against the wood to assure that his sister was truly asleep.

Caroline paused before she descended, turning her head over her shoulder.

“You’re not like the other boys,” she pronounced.

He stopped with his next step, folding his arms with one another. The need to know what she was getting at burned in him.

“Because I love my little sister?” Buck challenged.

The girl took a few steps down the stairs, and flashed up to him a half-smile. Caroline was pretty when she smiled. “Because you are not afraid to show it.”


	8. Chapter 8

Bucky paused alone just outside the Gardner’s guest bedroom where his little sister slept until their parents returned later that night. He supposed he should return downstairs, to keep company with Caroline.

With a soft click of a door opening, Lucy came out of Pearl’s darkened nursery. The middle Gardner daughter was already in her night clothes when Bucky and Rebecca first came to the house earlier in the evening, so he guessed that she wasn’t staying up.

“It’s my bedtime, too,” Lucy said softly, confirming his guess.

“Goodnight, Lucy,” Buck offered. He caught himself from giving the younger girl an embrace as was his family’s bedtime ritual and folded his half-outstretched arms in front of him instead.

“Goodnight, Bucky,” Lucy returned. “I’ll see you back at school on Monday, I guess.”

The girl was half-way down the hall when she stopped and retraced her steps. “Oh, I nearly forgot this.” She held out her hand to Bucky as if to give him something. 

The boy held out his own hand, palm up in order to take it. One by one, she dropped three glass marbles into cupped fingers. “Oh, you found them. Thank you!” He smiled and was genuinely glad to have them back.

Lucy just shrugged and walked away, saying over her shoulder, “It wasn’t that hard. If you had stayed…” The girl slipped in her bedroom and closed the door.

Bucky sighed, feeling that strange uncertainty and also a little annoyance. He shoved the marbles deep down in his pockets where they shouldn’t escape him again. Why couldn’t Lucy have said ‘you’re welcome’ and be done with it? For all these girls were supposedly well-heeled, they didn’t seem to think it was too important to be polite to him.

Rather than stand in the hallway for the rest of the evening, he took the stairs quietly. When Bucky came upon Caroline on the first floor, he half-expected her to have been magically transformed before him into the image of the woman on the cover of her magazine, painted and fashionable and entirely not real. 

When he found her bent over an opened cabinet in the parlor, it was a relief that she was just as she was when his parents had brought him to the house. Buck caught a gleam of gold and some sort of mechanism inside the cabinet door that Caroline manipulated, and he approached curiously.

Buck then heard a small hiss of sound that was at least a bit familiar to him, the introductory noise of a record being played on a victrola. The strains of music weren’t at the same pace and energy as when he had danced the Charleston; this was slower, and he could sense the _one-two-three_ count of it that he knew as a waltz.

Caroline took a step back from the device and reclined on the large couch, her eyes half-lidded.

“We have an hour or so before our parents come back. Why don’t you have a seat and tell me about yourself?”

Something told Bucky that he should not take his attention off of her, not even for a moment, and so he side-stepped to a lounge chair and settled himself in its swallowing cushions.

“Like what?” he inquired, stopping himself from fidgeting his leg.

“Like where you were born,” Caroline prompted. While she could have used that tone that made him feel unimportant, she had another voice that was warmer, encouraging.

“Shelbyville, Indiana,” he replied. “Outside Indianapolis.”

“And what did your father do before the war?”

“He was a driver,” Buck recalled. Pop didn’t talk a lot about his life before he became a part of the American Expeditionary Forces. Buck was too young to remember his father going away and returning.

“A driver? Like a chauffeur?” One of Caroline’s eyebrows raised.

Bucky shook his head. “No. Like...Um, he drove cars around tracks in Indianapolis.”

A bit of color came to her cheeks, a curl of her mouth. “A racer?” Her fingers trailed on her own throat in a way that caught his attention for a reason he could not explain.

He shrugged, trying not to stare. “Yeah. I guess. Test driver?” His gaze wavered up to the ceiling.

“And what do you want to be when _you’re_ grown up, Bucky? Another racing driver?” Buck hadn’t really thought of that. His father drove their family Studebaker mostly on Sundays, when they went to church or a social; he took pride in maintaining it himself. “Maybe a famous baseball player like Babe Ruth?” Yes, Buck _had_ daydreamed about that, quite a deal. All the boys did.

As the victrola went into another song, Buck focused again to Caroline, who now had shifted to directly face him, seated on the edge of the couch. She leant forward.

"My father thinks I'll go to West Point," he finally said with all seriousness, trying to sound as adult as he could manage.

"Ah, Yes. One of the elite," Caroline remarked. "Senator's and governor's sons are admitted into the Academy. Grandsons with military pedigrees going all the way back to the Revolutionary War. Are you one of those?"

How was it that she was so skilled at finding ways to make him seem small, unimportant, and dunce-like? He swallowed and frowned, wanting to leave the Gardner's and go home this instant. Maybe it was best if he went upstairs and sleep with his sister until their parents reclaimed them, but then Buck thought Caroline would just use that as another excuse to tear him down. His patience had worn out, God forgive him.

"No, I'm not," Buck snapped. "But I’m _also_ not such an idiot that I am rude to guests in my own home, just 'cause I got taken away from the fancy city and my fancy friends!" He found his shoulders squared and his fists balled, just as he was readying for an after-school fight. He would never physically hurt Caroline, but he wasn't about to take another of her verbal jabs anymore without defense.

The older girl's features belied her surprise. She blinked several times; but rather than frown and retort (or worse, burst into tears and storm off in hysterics), Caroline's lips finally twitched into a smile.

"You aren't like the other boys in this town _at all_ , James Buchanan Barnes," she repeated, her honeyed-colored eyes dancing. "If you really want to leave here someday, to be commissioned officer material, to be the darling of any pretty-faced and well-bred young woman you want, _to have the world as your oyster,_ I can teach you things."

Buck refused to let his jaw drop or to utter anything that made him sound dumb. If Caroline was certain that he was different than than the other boys, he was also sure she and her sister were the most peculiar girls he had ever met.

“Teach me things? Like what?” he finally asked.

“To dance for starters. With confidence,” Caroline returned. “I know you have fun at it, and a strong lead makes better practice. Lucy _and_ me. Also, I'll show what books to read that will open you to the world, the real world: complicated, brutal and beautiful. It’s the second-best thing to travel, really.”

That didn’t sound so bad. Still, at his age, boys didn’t spend much time with girls.

“So we practice whenever my parents leave us here to go out?” he guessed.

Caroline tilted her head back to laugh. “No, silly! At least once a week we'll get together; if you are going to get better, that is.” She then scoffed. “Of course, if you are too worried about your reputation with your playmates, we can always say you are taking piano lessons….”

“That would be a lie,” Buck countered. “My Father will...I’m not supposed to lie.” In this, he was resolute.

“Well, if we teach you a little piano when you come, it won’t be a lie then, will it?” Caroline retorted cleverly. “Those long fingers of yours. You may be very good at it, if you rehearse.”

Buck studied his hands in a way that he hadn’t ever before. He knew they were good at catching balls. Steady on the trigger of his Daisy 25. Clever when he knuckled down at marbles.

“Say ‘yes,’ Buck. I promise you won’t regret it,” the girl enticed.

“Can I think about for a little while?” he evaded, but he smiled back at her as if he had already agreed, just to see how Caroline would react.

“A little while,” she repeated, and rose from her chair. “Here. Come with me. I want to give you a taste of what I mean!”

Buck stood up again, and Caroline passed him on her way out the parlor, looking back over her shoulder to him. She was practically bouncing, and seemed just a big younger. Just like she had been when they first met on her porch and she pulled him in to dance the Charleston.

“Follow me to the study,” she directed. The fourteen-year old switched on more of the electric lights to illuminate their path.

He had been shown that way only a few hours before with Lucy. The room was filled with bookcases, neatly ordered and dusted. It also had a masculine feel about it. There was a table that he could envision cards and cigars enjoyed. Maybe even an illicit drink; that much he knew from the other boys’ talk, although Caroline may be dismissive of it. With Prohibition, there were those officers that had their own means to acquire something, often as gifts from overseas colleagues.

“Here!” Caroline beckoned, pressing herself close to a bookcase, motioning up and down four shelves. “Help me look for something. _‘Call of the Wild’_ by Jack London.”

Buck sat himself upon a finely woven rug to look at the bottom two rows, tilting his head to look at some of the titles.

“What’s it about?” he finally asked. It seemed he got only one sentence in for every ten of hers.

“Someone who gets kidnapped and brought to the snowy wilderness. He’s enslaved to cruel or ignorant masters, sold and resold several times. Finally, he’s rescued by someone good and becomes whom he was destined to be, all along. He does the incredible and avenges those whom he loves. In the end, he’s a creature that destroys all his enemies and leaves a legacy for all to awe,” Caroline replied.

The story sounded intriguing. It also sounded terrifying.

“Ahah!”

Caroline slipped out a thinner tome from the rows of thicker books. “Here. Take it home with you. Read it for a week or two. You may need a dictionary to look up some of the words, but that’s what you should be doing. You’ll need a good vocabulary.” 

She thrusted the book in Buck’s direction, and he took it.

“I’m thirsty; I’ll get us some tea." Caroline suggested. “You can start reading it upstairs or in the parlor if you’re going to stay up. When you’ve finished let me know about the full offer; you know, however long you take.” She winked at him, but like so many times, Caroline was the first to vacate the room.

Bucky continued to relax by looking at the cover, which was a drab-green weave with painted white mountains and black silhouettes of men and dogs on some sort of harness. Cross-legged, the ten-year-old-boy cracked open the book and read the first paragraph of _‘The Call of the Wild’_. To his astonishment, the protagonist’s name was his own.

_Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego. Because men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost._

James “Bucky” Barnes, whomever he had been before, by the alchemy of a few words of a book written more than ten years before his own birth and the enchantment of a debutante’s influence, was now on his way to becoming something very different indeed. He had been certain he'd have to wait till the age of twelve to be transformed. With this one passage, he could see that everything about life was much more complicated and wide than he ever imagined. He wanted to absolutely know where Puget Sound and San Diego were in relation to his Oklahoma home. He desired to know what 'tide-water' was. He craved, as Caroline offered, to have the world as his oyster. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Call of the Wild (featuring an animal protagonist named 'Buck'](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/215/215-h/215-h.htm) is a great reference for our sad Winter Soldier.


	9. Chapter 9

Buck went home that night from the Gardner’s drowsy in his father’s arms, clutching _’The Call of the Wild’_ tightly so as not to drop it. His father’s jacket was scented with cigarette smoke, and George Barnes hummed a melody to himself. The boy could not so much hear the tune as he felt it reverberate in the man’s chest, like a rumbling engine.

He cracked his eyes open briefly to look at his sister, who was bundled in a small quilt, her head resting on their mother’s shoulder. Even though the night-time sidewalks were dark as they walked the few blocks, he and his sister were as safe as they could ever be.

Buck thought he’d try to read a little more after he changed into his pajamas and he was tucked in, but he just found it too difficult to stay awake for much longer. His last conscious moments that night was to speak to his mother, her hair still done-up for the evening out.

“Did you like the music, Mom?” he asked drowsily.

Her hazel eyes warmed. “I always have,” she answered. "Live music best."

“Can I learn the piano with Miss Caroline? She's only askin’ five cents per lesson,” he inquired, trusting that the eldest Gardner girl had already brought it up to both her parents and the Barnes while he had earlier nodded off in a cursory sleep on the parlor’s couch. When she was eager for something, Caroline did not hesitate to press her interests, that much he was certain of.

“Your father and I will discuss it, dear,” Winifred offered. “Now go to sleep.” His mother kissed his forehead, then smoothed his hair. “You’ll let me know if that book gives you nightmares?” She nodded towards borrowed Jack London work that was set on the small table near his bed.

Buck frowned, vaguely disturbed. “Okay, Mom.” The other books that he consumed before bed, mostly young boys’ adventure series, were sometimes the cause of sleep fancies that had his heart pounding and excited in his slumber, but they were never the kind of dread. His few youthful nightmares were mostly of confronting other boys or of finding some toy of his missing or broken, like his pellet air rifle or his marbles, just when he was needing them. 

His imagination hadn’t strayed far from his everyday life until this night, and there was Caroline inviting him to not be like his peers, to think wider and deeper and to be _something else_. The borrowed book was her instrument, it was also his fascination.

“I love you, my boy,” his mother finished, evening his blankets with her hands.

“Love you, too,” he returned, then yawned widely. 

His mother’s long fingers turned off the lights in the room, and Buck’s exhaustion claimed him fully, with no fancy or nightmare to be remembered.


	10. Chapter 10

Buck was careful to balance his new interests with his old. Even though he was supposedly different from the other boys according to the Gardner sisters, Buck didn’t want to _seem_ all that distinct from his regular playmates. That just invited trouble, and while Buck was more than capable of standing up for himself, he’d rather not spend his schoolless vacation days being taunted with insults like 'bookworm' and 'sissy.' 

His skin tanned a deep golden brown from all the time he spent out on improvised ballfields on the dusty outskirts between the town and the fort. He was strong and limber and coordinated the way children who get plenty of fresh air and exercise are, before the awkward and uncertain years that awaited him and every other boy in the maturation to manhood.

It was the summer of 1927, and Babe Ruth and was on his way to a record breaking season. The Yankees games were re-broadcast on the radio from the station out of Oklahoma City, and he often went to other boy’s houses to listen to them. Mrs. Bennett was even kind enough to turn a table-top cathedral radio to sound out an open window, so her son and his friends could hear the game play out on the street at the same time as they pitched the ball back and forth to one another.

Today was Tuesday, and Tuesdays and Thursdays meant his piano lessons at the Gardners, three o’clock, on the dot. Buck excused himself a little early, sliding off his glove.

“Gotta go!” he pronounced. “Let me know the score tomorrow.”

“Piano lessons?” Harry inquired. “What a stupid way to spend the summer. Who wants to be indoors for half of it?”

“Yeah,” the Barnes boy agreed with a shrug. As he turned and walked backwards, he rolled his eyes for extra emphasis, though inwardly he was grinning, recalling a sentence that was in the first chapter of the book he was quickly memorizing: _...Buck was neither house-dog nor kennel-dog. The whole realm was his._

As Bucky walked the blocks to the Gardner’s house he caught a whiff of something in the air, and his head immediately trained to the west, where the great thunderstorms blew in from May through September. He could see the darkened horizon, and if he looked up further, the thin film of high vapor that preceded a great anvil-shaped colossus of a cloud.

He gave a short wrap on the screen door, and Lucy answered. “Playing ball again?” she inquired.

“Yup.” Buck tossed his scuffed baseball up in the air towards her as he stepped through, and the girl made a small surprised noise as she reached to catch it. It landed safely in her hands. “What do _you_ do all day?” he asked, trying to not make it sound smug.

“Teach Pearl her numbers and letters. We help Virginia in the kitchen. She and the maid are showing us how to cook. Caroline’s pretty horrible at it,” she confessed. It sounded rather dull to Buck, and he began to scheme what he may do to get the Gardner girls out into more of the sunshine.

“May I use the bathroom?” he asked, politely, although it was quickly becoming a known part of his visitations that the boy would go upstairs, relieve himself, and wash the dirt from his hands and face and neaten his hair with a wetted comb before he entered the parlor.

The afternoon lessons usually started with him actually sitting at the piano with Lucy at the bench to co-teach, although every person under the age of sixteen in the house knew it was not the primary purpose in his visits. The sessions were conveniently timed when both Virginia and Pearl were often out of house on afternoon social calls.

“By the end of the summer, your parents will want to hear a rehearsal, so you’ll have to be at least somewhat better,” Caroline admonished when they started weeks ago. With fifteen minutes of practice on a pieces he learned were called _études_ (why did everything of high culture seem to be termed in French?), and another fifteen minute introduction to a new exercise, twice a week, Buck was actually improving. He liked the texture of the white and black keys under his fingertips. The instrument’s unique sound reminded him of raindrops or dripping icicles. In the heat of summer, it was a cooling thought.

“You’d get much better if your house had its own piano,” Caroline suggested.

“We couldn’t afford it,” Buck responded softly, trying not to let his pride goad him into defensiveness.

“Oh,” she returned but unfazed. The Dauntless Caroline, Bucky had started calling her in his head. “What if we got a replacement and sold you this one used?”

His hands paused on the keys rather than try to continue their scales. “That’s not up to me.”

“What if I bring it up to my father and Virginia?” Caroline asked.

Buck had other ideas. “Why don’t we talk to _our_ folks about it when my family invites yours to picnic and swim up at Lake Lawtonka in a few Saturdays? You’ve been up to the lake, right?”

He looked to Lucy and not her older sister, seeking a more immediate and honest reaction. The younger girl seemed taken aback, as if she were not used to someone other than Caroline daring anything new. He smiled and winked winningly at Lucy, and she bit her lips against her grin.

“Well, no,” Caroline acknowledged. “We haven’t been there. But we do have swimsuits! I think it would be the berries.” Goodness knows where she was getting her slang, but he figured fresh berries in the summertime were great, so she must have thought it was a sweet idea.

“Well, then I’ll ask my folks to invite your family,” Buck replied and was about to return to his piano exercise when the first deep rumble of thunder rolled through the open windows and into the parlor, shortly followed by a ozone-laden gust. He felt both a tightness and a leap in his chest like he had on Christmas morning. Bucky knew how these midwestern storms acted, intensely violent and beautifully thrilling all at once, blowing through within an hour.

“We should close up the windows,” he said as he rose from the bench with all the sageness of an old farm-hand.

“We’re on it!” Caroline responded, already pounding half-way down the foyer to the stairway. “I’ll get the upstairs. Lu, the down?!” she called.

“Okay,” Lucy agreed hesitantly.

“I’ll help you,” Buck offered, and started from the back of the house to the front to close everything up against the impending rain and wind. The first fat and heavy drops threw themselves against the house before the children were done securing it.

He beamed encouragingly at the younger daughter when he heard a noise that was still unfamiliar to him, the cheery rings of a telephone call to the house.

“I got it!” Caroline called from the landing and hustled her way down to the foyer, where the brass candlestick-looking thing decorously sat on a side-table. 

Bucky looked on curiously as the girl picked up the cone shaped receiver and put it to her ear, with a “Hello? Gardner’s residence.” A pause. “Yes, Mrs. Barnes. He’s here. Would you like to talk with him?” Caroline then motioned for him to come closer and thrust the receiver to one hand and the transmitter in another.

“Um. Hello?” he spoke into the device, and his mother’s disembodied voice came into his ear through the wired cone.

_“Hello, dear. I called to check up on you to make sure you were inside. I’m at the Greens with Rebecca. Do the Gardner’s have a storm cellar?”_

“Yeah, I think so,” he replied. “It’s out back, near the kitchen door.”

 _”Alright, James. If things get bad, you bring the Gardner girls into the cel--_ ” His mother’s voice dropped out in a crackle the moment before he heard the crack of a nearby lightning strike.

Lucy was now clutching her sister, her knuckles white on Caroline’s arm.

Buck’s heart pounded as he called into the telephone, “Mom? Mom!?” 

_”Yes, son, I’m here. Just stay at the Gardner’s until the storm is well passed. When you don’t hear anymore thunder, then come on home. Dinner just may be a little late tonight is all.”_

”Okay, Mom.”

_”I love you, my boy. Goodbye.”_

“Goodbye, Mom,” Buck spoke into the mouth piece, but didn’t know whether she heard it or not. He passed the device back to Caroline, who freed herself from Lucy to hang up the ear piece and set it back down on the table.

Another rip of lightning tore outside, and the house was growing darker as the clouds blotted out the sun. Buck looked at the two girls’ worried faces and decided that he would have to be the one in charge.

“My mom says I’m to stay here till the storm passes through. Everyone in town is probably hunkered down. We could do anything we wanted. Wanna practice our waltz, Lu?” It was odd to use her name so informally, like her sister did, but he thought it may help calm her.

“But what about the storm?” she asked, and Caroline too seemed intent on his answer. The rain began to pelt in earnest against the side of the house. He wondered if they had ever seen what a hail-stone looked like.

“We’ll just turn on some lights and watch it through the windows. If I think we need it, we’ll go to the shelter.” He gave to them the gentle smile he gave his sister. “Come on now, no reason for some lightning and thunder to ruin the afternoon. We can cut some rug!”

The electrical lights flickered occasionally and the victrola sputtered, but the power to the home held as they practiced their dancing. 

Lucy and he were getting much better at their turns. They switched up in the next song to a more traditional Viennese Waltz (Buck couldn’t help but look up where Vienna was in one of the Gardner’s atlases a few weeks ago, and Caroline pointed out cities like London, Paris, and Berlin, too). He fantasized that he was skating and gliding with the younger girl over a frozen lake rather than across the polished parlor floor.

Bucky was decent enough at his school work, B’s and a few A-minuses, but his eagerness to take in geography and history was indulged by Caroline in a self-selected curriculum that was fueled in half by his curiosity and half by the notion that the world was infinite _and_ accessible all at the same time. Not a week or so ago, Lindbergh had flown all the way from New York to Paris without a single stop. The radio and newspapers were all abuzz with it, and it was all that his father talked about around the breakfast and dinner table too for a few days. It was all over the town, and in the lengthening summer evenings, Buck would go to the edge of the neighborhood that summer to watch airplanes take off and land from the fort’s air-strip. The Barnes’ boy used to dream about being a baseball player, but the idea of becoming a pilot was also taking root in his imagination.

“It’s my turn, Lu,” Caroline said at the conclusion of the song and his revery. With the victrola silent, the rush of the rain and the rumble of the storm reasserted itself.

Buck took the fourteen-year-old-girl’s right hand into his left and placed his other just against her left shoulder blade. “How about something for the Foxtrot? Bucky can improvise with me.”

The Fox was much more sedate than the Charleston. When Lucy queued another record, Buck took the lead with as much confidence as he had ever had, stepping and turning and rocking with the older girl that had half a head of height on him.

“You know, when you are a bit older, Valentino, we’ll start the tango,” Caroline suggested, almost like a purr. “It’s not a dance for young boys.”

Buck sighed but tried not didn’t let it phase him too much that there was yet another thing he’d have to wait on till he gained a few inches and started sprouting whiskers.

Caroline decided to be introspective for once, or at least share her thoughts with him. “If the ‘Call of the Wild’ is teaching you anything, James Buchanan Barnes, it should be that there is a cruelness and wickedness in the hearts of desperate grown men and women. Don’t be in such a hurry to get older; life isn't so simple then."

Buck shrugged just as grumbles of thunder rolled over one another, overcoming the tune of the record. "If you say so, Caroline." He cast his eyes to Lucy then, who nodded sadly and looked out at the rain-lashed street. It was their mother, he was certain. They both loved and missed their own mother. He then swallowed, felt a bit of sadness with them, and became determined to try not to take anything good in his life for granted, ever again.


	11. Chapter 11

Bucky’s next year was filled with many ordinary experiences of boyhood in an Oklahoman town. He continued in his school as he always did; he played sports during recess breaks and after school with the other boys. Sometimes he’d even go with friends after school to one of the town’s moving picture theaters using money he’d earn on odd-jobs of painting fences, preparing garden beds, or mowing lawns.

One afternoon in October, Buck stood in line with his friends to buy his ticket when he heard a girl just back in line (one that went to another school and not his own) complaining to her own friend she was just a penny short. Buck fished in his pocket for the red cent he had in change after buying himself a soda-pop while waiting to meet up with Peter and Harry.

“Here,” Buck offered the girl. “I got an extra.”

The girl’s mouth half-dropped and she seemed to almost be in terror as she stammered her thanks. Her friend’s face wore the same amount of shock and nervousness.

Buck was confused, and he felt a jab of a sharp elbow in his ribs. It was Peter, leaning into his ear, his hand pressing on the other boy’s shoulder. “C’mon back in line, Buck,” he hissed under his breath, shuffling him away from the girls. “You shouldn’t have done that; folks might start thinkin’ you’re a _nigger-lover_.”

Buck frowned, troubled and unsettled. He knew that the balcony in the theater was sectioned off for _COLOREDS,_ which was a shame because he thought the higher seats were probably more fun of a vantage. For the most part, Buck never really spoke to any of the negroes that populated the town; they had separate schools, separate churches, separate social clubs. The only time that he really could interact with the negro children was at the cinema or by chance encounter on the street.

And now Peter was warning him that a simple act of kindness was somehow _wrong_ and dangerous.

Buck’s mind was only half on the movie that day, and when the theater’s lights darkened, he looked over his shoulder and up to the balcony. The girl he had given the penny to was in the first row there, leaning over the balustrade slightly. Her eyes glittered and reflected like two beautiful stars in the flickering twilight. She caught his gaze and smiled at him once, furtively.

When Buck went over to the Gardner house for music and dancing practice, Caroline would occasionally wax about this jazz performer or that. Half of the songs that spun on the Gardners’ victrola were performed by famous and talented negroes like Duke Ellington. 

No one in the Barnes or Gardner family had anything bad to say about coloreds as a whole. Sometimes Pop spoke of negroes in the Army called the “buffalo soldiers” that were once stationed at the fort a few decades ago with a certain nostalgia. Still, the military families living in the town did not interact with the Indians or Blacks. The streets criss-crossed the settlement in regular and predictable grids, but everyone kept to their quadrants and neighborhoods except for the center of town commerce. 

“It’s not all like it is here, so close to the old South,” his mother had told him when Bucky finally got up the nerve to share with her what had happened. “Yes, everyone had their own church congregations, but it was different in the city I grew up in. Not perfect, but a bit better. There wasn’t laws that tried to keep the Jews and Italians and Irish and Blacks invisible to each other.”

There were things rotten in his world, Buck was realizing now as he grew older and older. Difficulties in imagined fictional accounts had their roots in his very real life. The very notion that he could face some sort of punishment for being generous to another soul rankled and stung him personally as well as felt counter to the Christian charity he had been raised to embrace.

He was a boy only, and could do little about the decisions of theater managers and school principals and mayors. The only thing he could do was promise himself to remember that nameless girl in the balcony and the chafing feeling of the mandated gulf between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had intended an entirely different chapter until, in my research, I ran across [footage taken of African American communities from Oklahoma towns in the 1920s](http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/solomon-sir-jones-films-1924-1928).
> 
> In the spirit of Captain America and the Howling Commandos, I felt the need to write this as a seed for both Bucky's and Steve's later viewpoint on racism and the other -isms which are vehicles of fear and hate. Yes, I use the "N-word" in a historical context to drive home the point. Jim Crow laws were rampant in the 1920s where Bucky's family was stationed. I figured I'd acknowledge that, rather than have his 'home town' seem idyllic.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Relocating to a new home took time away from writing. Now that I'm more-or-less settled in, the chapters should be coming more regularly again. Thanks to my readers for their patience. (I've also been a bit in 'research mode' of late prepping for the next few chapters).
> 
> This is a small and quiet 'bridge' chapter to some further plot down the line.

The night before his twelfth birthday, Bucky Barnes hardly slept a wink. The scent of a cake baking in the oven after he went to bed permeated into his bedroom. He imagined it cooling on the kitchen table next to his applications for the Boy Scouts of America and the local American Legion baseball team. He filled them out himself after supper, sitting at the writing desk in the living room while the evening radio shows aired. Pop smiled at his boy from his favorite chair whenever Buck looked up.

By the luck of it, the date fell on a Saturday so he had the whole day of celebration, not just an after-school party. His father had promised him a special surprise that had his son speculating.

What wasn't a surprise was the Gardner family hosting his afternoon’s celebration in their more expansive home. Ever since that June picnic on the lake a few years ago, the shared enterprise between he and Caroline, the two families had grown much closer. The Gardner’s old upright piano found a place next to the Barnes’ family radio; just this year Caroline began giving music lessons to Rebecca, who was picking it up much faster and would likely play better than Buck ever would.

Lieutenant Gardner was fond of Sergeant Barnes’ son, and the three of them often went fishing together on Lake Lawtonka. Bucky counted himself lucky, for the attention he got from both men was almost like having two Pops. For his family's own part, George Barnes offered to teach Caroline how to drive, and the Gardner daughter always came back from the lessons laughing and energized, as if she had been on a great adventure. His father, too, seemed animated in the aftermath of the lessons. 

Buck's legs had lengthened and could reach the pedals of a motorcar, but his father was insistent that his own driving lessons would wait another year. In the last few months, there were other small changes to his body, but as of yet he felt largely himself; sure of foot, eye, and hand.

When Buck practiced his dancing once a week, it was primarily with Lucy, who had caught up to him in height. It was clear that Caroline, now at sixteen, saw herself as more an adult now than a child, and she had her own friends that she socialized with most afternoons and sometimes in the evenings. She went to the cinema and the local soda fountain in the company of boys as well as girls, and Buck imagined what it would be like to be four years older and among them. 

When that time came he wondered if Lucy would join him, or would her shy nature keep her at home? It was easy to look over the middle Gardner girl, but Buck found himself during their sessions liking the warm mahogany color framing her pupils. He didn’t know why he had the impulse to appreciate her that way; he only hoped that when his hand clasped with hers as they partnered, it didn’t seem as uncertain to her as it did to him.

As he stared up at the darkened ceiling, Buck chided himself for thinking so far ahead, again. He was _twelve_ tomorrow, and there was so many opportunities once school ended for the season -- camping and canoeing trips and baseball games -- that he should not cast his imagination beyond the summer.

He was too old now to ask his mother to sing him lullabies, but he could hum along to the arrangements of the songs he liked most to play on their piano. He closed his eyes and tried thinking of the notes like falling stars across the firmament of the midnight sky, and that finally eased him into slumber.


	13. Chapter 13

A little hand was grasping and shaking at his arm. “Bucky!” Becca’s clear voice pierced through his sleep.

His little sister had awoken him like this the first day she started school, when he was counted upon to walk her down the familiar sidewalks to the two-story brick building that was the seat of their ongoing education. Despite being a bit younger than most of her classmates, the Gardners’ had placed Pearl along with Rebecca in the same class.

“Bucky!” she called again.

“Wha’?” the boy muttered, sighing. He was always a light sleeper, but if he feigned drowsiness, perhaps his sister would leave him alone, at least until after the pallid blue colors of the coming day asserted themselves more strongly into oranges and reds.

“It’s your birthday!” his sister told him, excitedly. Buck cracked open his eyes to find Becca looking anxiously at him, clutching one of her children’s books that the Gardners had gifted her. Her strawberry-blonde hair sported little knotted rags, which he knew when undone they would give her soft curls.

“Becca, you should go back to bed,” he whispered. “Mom and Pop aren’t up yet.” He remembers telling her this a year ago, too, on Christmas morning. Not that Bucky wasn’t as excited for this day as well, but he had better sense at this age than to wake the house. Knowing the futility of trying to get his sister to go back to her room, Bucky sat up in his bed and scooted back. “You want me to read with you before we get up?”

“Uh-huh!” the girl nodded with exaggerated movements of her chin.

“Alright, Becca-boo.” He turned on the lamp and scooted over a little and the girl climbed beside him. She rested her head against his shoulder as Buck enclosed her in the loose circle that was his arms and the open book. 

“Which chapter?” the older boy prompted, stifling a yawn with the back of his fist.

“Eight,” Rebecca pronounced. She had likely memorized it much as Buck did with his books, knowing which pages to find his favorite passages.

“Eight,” he repeated, and with quick fingers he landed on the chapter. “Ah. _’In which Piglet does a very grand thing.’_ ” He cleared his throat as quietly as he could. _”’Half-way between Pooh's house and Piglet's house was a Thoughtful Spot where they met sometimes when they had decided to go and see each other, and as it was warm and out of the wind they would sit down there for a little and wonder what they would do now that they had seen each other…’”_

There were times when Bucky longed for a brother near to his age to share in that close fraternity that only boys could, like a Pooh and Piglet, but somehow grander. He wanted to fish together, rough-house together, and have adventures together. He wanted to talk about their hopes for the future, and what it would be like to play in the professional leagues or race cars or attempt Mount Everest. His friends, the army kids and others from his school, were good to toss a ball around with or to swim with or go to the cinema with, but the Barnes boy could not call any one of them his _best_ friend, the kind of friend he could have told about Caroline’s kiss or Lucy’s dimples when she rarely smiled, or his interest in cities further away than Chicago or San Francisco.

Twelve was old enough to realize that he couldn’t simply blow on some candles and wish for a brother, but maybe he’d meet other boys through scouting or one of their multi-troop activities. It was a long-shot, but he put some hope on it anyway.

As much as Buck longed for a confidante, he also reserved a place in his heart for his little sister, whom he could never say no to, as hard as he tried. So they read together for a while, until the sun peaked over the horizon and washed his curtains in golden light.

“Good morning, Mom. Morning, Pop,” he greeted to the two figures who then came to his door.

Becca vaulted off his bed and declared. “It’s Bucky’s birthday!”

“Yes it is,” George confirmed, his hands tucked in the pockets of his night-jacket. “And Private Barnes is going to need a very good breakfast before we all take a morning drive out to the fort.” The sergeant then departed the doorway to tend to his routines, leaving Buck wondering why the start of the day would bring him to the military base. As far as he knew, there was no demonstration, marking of a historical victory, or welcoming of a high-ranking officer or politician that warranted the family’s presence.

His mother extended a hand to her daughter. “Come with me, Rebecca. Your brother needs to get washed and dressed. Will you help me ice the biscuits after we fix your hair?” The girl grabbed her book and half-skipped to Winifred with a quiet ‘okay.’

Buck searched for some clues in his mother’s face, and then finding nothing, he stood out of bed and began to make the sheets and blankets orderly again.

“James?” his mother voiced, and he lifted his gaze to watch her light hand rested on his sister’s shoulder. “You’ll need to bring an extra thick sweater where you’re going today, so don’t forget that and the knitted hat your Aunt Janet sent you for Christmas.”

“Sure, Mom,” he agreed, though he had never been particularly fond of Aunt Janet’s pea-green and red yarned gift. He had never met his aunt, but was told she lived ‘back East’.

His mother’s instructions had him doubly curious. He would be going somewhere cold. It was only March in Oklahoma, and the fields and plains were still a bleached tan and grey from the whipping winds and dry, flurried snows of the months before, but it wasn’t so cold that a regular jacket did not suffice when out-of-doors. Buck was puzzled, but he obeyed the same, setting out his warmest winter clothes.

At breakfast, he ate everything put in front of him: the sweet biscuits filled with raisins, the over-easy eggs, and the tall glass of creamy milk. His stomach, with its ever-demanding hunger, was satiated for the moment. Not even the anticipation of the day and its mystery could curb his appetite.

His father flipped through the newspaper and commented. “That hollow leg of yours finally filled, my boy?”

Bucky licked the last of the icing off his fingers and nodded, smiling. “Thanks, Mom. That was a swell breakfast.”

Sergeant Barnes half-folded his reading and peered over the edge of the paper at his son. “Would you like some coffee, James?” he asked, taking up his own cup for a punctuating sip.

Buck felt his eyebrows raise. He hadn’t thought about the black brew much, only that his mother and father had cups of it every morning at breakfast. Once, when he was seven, he had purloined a taste of his father’s cup while his mother was distracted with changing Rebecca and his father had already left for the fort; the boy found it bitter and altogether unpleasant. Maybe as a twelve year old it would taste different. At least adults seemed to like it, and Caroline once said having it in the mornings ‘changed her day.’

“Sure, Pop. I’ll try it,” Buck finally agreed, to which his mother took another coffee cup and saucer down from the shelf. Winifred didn’t immediately reach for the percolator, but for her baking jar of white sugar and a splash of cream from the ice-box. She poured the drink in a steaming brown cascade into the cup and stirred it with a small spoon before setting it down before Bucky. 

“Care it’s not too hot,” she warned, and the boy took a tentative sip. The cream mellowed the roasted flavor while the sugar ameliorated the bitterness. It was not something he first thought he would appreciate, but the additives made it intriguingly palatable. He found himself smiling back and forth to both his parents, taking a larger swallow of it.

“One cup only at breakfast, son,” his father admonished, though there was a warm tone to his voice. “Too much will have you buzzing like a Curtiss engine.”

Buck found himself biting his lower lip. There was a hint there, a clue as to what was ahead at the end of their drive to the fort.

His father had a natural mind for machines and pistons and trajectories, and George was a go-between the men on the field using the artillery and the engineers and machinists that designed and built it. His talent is what kept Sergeant Barnes on the Army’s payroll when most other men were discharged after the Great War.

The boy couldn’t puzzle out much from the enigmatic statement, so he just left it be. His father passed him the newspaper and Buck settled into read it. Since Caroline had leant him _Call of the Wild_ and he had agreed to her tutelage ‘in the ways of the wider world,’ one of the things Buck did was read the local newspaper for its national and international news. 

Caroline’s ‘education’ wasn’t always music practice, dancing, and unspoken words-between-words and knowing glances. After his morning’s ritual read, George was content to leave the paper to his son; Buck would then rip out the articles of his curiosity and bring them to the Gardner’s home for discussion. Sometimes Caroline would refer him to a magazine (the Lieutenant’s household had many subscriptions), and he’d learn more there. Sometimes it was the matter of going to the Encyclopedia Britannica. And other times, if it was about cinema or popular music or modern novels, he consulted the elder girl directly. Sometimes, there must have been a certain slant to his questions that had Caroline half-lidding her eyes and stretching out her long, stockinged legs and telling him he’d have to wait a few years for the full truth.

“When you are finished and prepared, Private Barnes, help your mother get on Rebecca’s coat and shoes.” His father’s voice pierced through the other internal voice in his head he had been listening to, concentrating on excerpts of Herbert Hoover’s inaugural speech as the thirty-first President of the United States, which Bucky had caught broadcasted over the radio days before but wanted to read word-for-word.

“Yes, Sir!” he responded automatically, draining the last of his coffee and setting aside the newspaper.

Wherever he was going, it was outside the home and not to school, and it should be that Bucky looked his best. Not only for neatness’ and cleanliness’ sake, but for a bit of pride, to set himself apart from the other boys his age as more worldly. So he made a quick dash to the bathroom mirror to brush his teeth. He also combed back his hair, figuring someday soon he’d ask his father about the pomade that many men used in their hair to keep it styled even with the donning and taking-off of hats everyday.

Even if it was his special day, Buck rode in the back bench seat of the family auto with his sister, heading along the familiar route to the fort. He’d been many of the places of ceremony and significance there, but when the car veered towards the air-field, the boy’s curiosity caused him to press his forehead and nose against the glass. His left ankle bounced in anticipation, and he clutched the extra clothing that his parents instructed him to bring. 

The family car passed hangar by hangar, and Buck tried to consume the details of every military aeroplane that they passed. Regular Saturdays and Sundays were typically slow at the installation, and most everything was in a closed building or tied down.

At the edge of the mowed airstrip, George Barnes pulled up the vehicle and when parked, checked his pocket watch.

“Any minute now,” the man pronounced to his family. “Let’s get a better look.”

So mother, daughter, father and son opened the doors and stepped out onto the cool and quiet plain, with little but the wind for company.

Buck took in a deep breath of air, letting it fill his lungs to the bottom of his navel as he stretched his legs. It was a clear day, the sky was cerulean blue and ground bleached straw, with only a few puffs of clouds drifting in the general west to east direction that was the weather patterns of the great prairies.

His father lifted and set Becca up on the curved hood of the car, which was still warm from the engine. Winifred stroked the red and gold spun-dawn curls back from her freckled face before replacing the girl’s bowled hat.

The sergeant must have spotted something in the sky with his eagle-gaze, because he stepped behind Bucky and cupped his hands just behind his son’s ears.

“Listen,” George said, and used the most precise and gentle of pressure to guide and focus Buck’s hearing upon a still-speck of a target. A hum, a vibration, little more. “Wait,” his father tutored. “Scouting is all about patience and keeping your eyes and ears focused.”

So the boy willed himself not to get too excited, and to find that place between perfect stillness and tension when he shot at tin cans and when his fingers placed the exact musical notes that eyes read without knowing.

“What is it, Father?” Buck asked. He decided that upon this moment, the formal address was better than his usual designation of ‘Pop’.

“Wait,” George said again, and Buck’s eyes tracked the sound until the airborne source became a mote in the sky that his far-away study caught approaching the field. As the sound of the aeroplane’s engine grew louder, his father’s hands fell away. Buck experimented with using his curved fingers to concentrate the sound, and found it a neat and useful trick.

“It’s a biplane,” the boy observed, making out the two sets of wings on the craft.

As the painted plane descended and neared, it flew parallel to the runway about half a mile out, then made turns to line itself up for landing. But its wheels didn’t touch the earth and it hovered a short number of yards above. Instead, the plane’s wings dipped back and forth several times as if in greeting. For a few tense seconds, it seemed to be aimed head on, right towards their vehicle.

His heart suddenly pumped double-time, and Buck debated snatching his sister from the hood of the car and diving into the dirt. He looked to his father, who was simple waving his arm in greeting to the pilot, seeming unconcerned about a potential impact as the distance closed. Bucky stood frozen.

Then in a rush of noise and swirling gales, the plane lifted just slightly and passed harmlessly overhead by a hundred feet or so. Becca shrieked in surprise and his mother clutched her hat rather than have it whipped from her head by the whirlwind.

His pulse still quickened, Buck tracked the bi-wing as it climbed, turned, leveled out and then dropped altitude again in a true approach of the grass runway. The wheels touched with just a small puff of dust.

As the aircraft taxied towards his family, Buck was pretty certain who was behind the controls, even though he could not see much of the man’s face behind the goggles or aviator’s cap.

His father hand clasped his son’s shoulder in a light hold while the pilot killed the sputtering engine and removed the communications gear he wore. Buck noticed that there were two cockpits, not just one, and all the mysteries and clues pointed to one thing: that Lieutenant Gardner was going to take him into the skies.

Before he could contain himself, Buck pivoted around, closed his eyes, and squeezed his arms with all his might around his father, bouncing up and down on his toes. “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” he rapidly fired off.

“You should be thanking the lieutenant. It was his idea, borrowing it from a friend out of Oklahoma City,” George rumbled, though he embraced his son back with one arm around the boy’s shoulder.

The lieutenant’s shadow fell on the Barnes men, and Buck spun back towards the nearing pilot.

“Thank you, Sir!” he offered, smiling widely in his excitement to the other officer, who was clad in aviator’s leathers.

“You’re not safe back on _terra firma_ yet, son,” the man replied. “Thank me then. And how many times must I ask you to call me ‘Mr. Gardner?’”

Buck knew his father liked military order and protocol, and so he answered: “At least one more time, Sir.”

William Gardner laughed and shook his head, his hands on his hips. "Well, come on, boy! Put on that sweater and hat of yours, and let’s see if we can’t have your mother praying you live to blow out your candles this afternoon.”


	14. Chapter 14

William Gardner strapped Buck into the seat of the plane and explained a few of the mirror instruments set before his passenger. He quizzed the boy on the strength of his stomach when in motion. No, he had never gotten sick on a drive, or on the Ferris Wheel or any other carnival ride that had played with gravity.

“Then I think we should have some _real_ derring-do fun,” the lieutenant pronounced.

“I’d like that a lot, Sir!” he answered, testing the knot of his hat under his chin. It held.

The sensation in Bucky’s stomach wasn’t exactly butterflies. It wasn’t the nervous clench he had when made to read aloud in class, or even worse when he expected a disciplining from his father (which was rare) and his face burned in the expectation of a shaming. It was something he anticipated with an uncertain yet eager hunger. Bucky didn’t quite understand the feeling, but he began to associate it with experiences that were novel and slightly dangerous. Was this was the thrill George Barnes felt all those years ago, testing the capabilities of motorcars; pushing them to their limits? The courting of a city-born girl on a hot and humid summer night while the colors of Fourth of July mortars exploded overhead? Buck was only certain of one thing; he felt _alive_.

“Bang on the fuselage three even times with your hand if we need to cut short and make a quick landing. Alright, my boy?” William Gardner had directed, just before he started the biplane’s engine again. 

The twelve-year-old waved to his parents and sisters as he sped off towards the end of the field for the takeoff.

When the wheels of the biplane left the ground, Buck already felt a mile high. The little drop in his gut when Lieutenant Gardner pulled up on the controls at the take-off was the last flutter of his nervousness. Although the front cockpit was deep and he was well strapped into the seat, it was almost as if he himself sprouted wings. 

The aircraft made one more pass at the car before climbing, dipping the left wing briefly so Buck could wave again to his family below. While an extra set of aviator’s goggles protected his eyes from the sting of the wind and any debris, there was nothing but the small glass shield in front of him protecting his teeth, which stung in the cold as he grinned. He was glad for Aunt Janet’s hat now in the buffet of gusts against him.

The boy was in awe of just how different the world looked from the perspective of a few thousand feet above it. With the distance came a clarity Buck had never had before, which both like and unlike the books he read of far-and-away places and peoples. From his view, he could hold out a thumb and block an entire building. He recalled his father’s recollections of bombs dropped from airships in the Great War, and that caused him to pull back his hand and think on other things, which was blessedly easy to do with the fascinating views and forces before him.

Buck saw the fort and his hometown and the snake of a creek that muddily winded through it. He saw the lake he had swam in for many years and the wide geography of the Oklahoma plains, carved like quilts into the dusty, treeless reaches of farmland acres, awaiting the next spring’s tilling and planting. He marveled at the feat of engineering that was the spars and wires, instruments and metal skin of the machine he flew in; it was a small miracle all held together by humanity’s ingenuity and nothing more.

The boy was shaken out of his revery when the world -- in the literal sense -- turned upside down. After a bank and climb closer to the fort, Buck observed the nose of the plane first rise and tug to the left, and with elegant ease the horizon tipped more and more sideways until the earth was above his head.

He laughed and hollered in joy as ever-so-slowly the craft righted itself again. He was amazed at the happiness that sang in his nerves. Was he meant for the sky? To land himself in the eye of the moon?

Several of Lieutenant Gardner’s aerobatic maneuvers pushed him deep into his seat or had him feeling floating, sometimes in short succession. Buck’s stomach held true while his heart and mind soared like an eagle upon currents of fancy and delight.

By the time Buck’s feet touched ground again, it was a wonder he remembered how to stand at all. When he pulled himself out of the forward cockpit, and his soles landed upon that fabled _terra firma_ , Buck realized that there was not one car but two at rest on the edge of the airfield.

“You go and wish the girls a good morning, James,” his father instructed. “The Lieutenant and I will tie down the plane.”

Caroline had driven her family’s auto to the fort, and both she and Lucy mingled with his mother and his sister. The young women wore fashionable jackets and hats, as if they were going on a church picnic.

His blood up, Buck strode to them confidently, scraping off his knitted hat and raking his hands through his dark hair, trying to smooth down the part. He grinned widely as he closed the distance, his gaze alighting on the younger of his friends.

“Did you see it, Lu?” he breathed. The others, including Caroline, were dimmer somehow than the ten-year-old girl in his sight. Her woolen hat was a periwinkle blue, and it brought out the golden hues in her warm brown eyes.

Lucy smiled prettily, and she looked down to the boy’s shoes. There was a flush to her cheeks. “It was hard keeping the secret,” she said. 

In that moment, Buck entertained the notion of one day asking the Lieutenant’s permission to marry Lucille Eleanor Gardner. He had to make his way first, secure a livelihood. His father had a career all planned out for him, true. But certainly, in that plotting, there would be time for learning the mysteries that existed between a man and a woman. The force of that attraction he imagined like gravity, noticeable to the ordinary person only when influenced by speed and desired trajectory.

“I hope you won’t keep _all_ of them from me,” he replied to the girl, who only flushed deeper but looked to him with a soft gaze like the romantic leads did in the cinema. Buck was soaring yet again, keenly aware of the pulls of his own charm for the first time.

 _Someday,_ he thought to himself. _Someday._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The roll of the dice between short chapter/frequent updates and long chapter/awaiting audience fell on the side of the former. Man, I want to take a joyride in a biplane now. (Also some subtle HBO Carnivale references nods.)


	15. Chapter 15

The Gardners' home was already whirlwind of activity when their two-car caravan pulled into the drive. Virginia and the maid, Sarah, were busy in the kitchen making all sorts of delights for the afternoon party. Thanks to the new electric refrigerator, there was even ice-cream to be had. Buck had marveled at it with Lucy, Pearl, and Rebecca days before; Caroline seemed indifferent to it.

The two families had a light, informal luncheon in the parlor together before the guests arrived in little over an hour. The adults insisted that Bucky show off his skills at the piano. Buck wiped his lips with his napkin, and thought about it a moment, glancing from the beautiful, darkly-stained, baby grand piano to the mahogany-haired girl of his fancy.

“If Miss Lucy would be so kind as to share in a duet with me?” he asked, and while his words were formal, he pitched his tone just a little on the playful side.

He tried to find meaning in the nuances to the small muscles of her face when she agreed in her soft voice. Buck decided to make it his personal quest that at least once before she was sixteen, the quiet Gardner girl would embrace something enthusiastically and without cause for doubt or reticence. If he was lucky, that something would be _him._

“ _Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty?_ ” he inquired, shuffling through the sheet music until he found the Ravel piece, which was challenging enough on his part to play and, while well below his partner’s skill level, was one that reminded him of her: a bit delicate and a bit melancholy and a bit isolated from the world.

It was a sedate piece, but as his fingers and Lucy’s touched the keys and her delicate wrists sometimes flitted over his to land the deeper notes of her part, Rebecca and Pearl danced fancifully with each other, like two fairies. The young girls were uncaring of form and prescribed steps in their improvised and carefree movements that stretched their tiny limbs to the fullest.

Buck was the single young man amid a cadre of growing girls, and despite what was probably an ungentlemanly attitude, he reveled in his special station. Even in Virginia, who was (almost-scandalously) twelve years younger than her husband, he saw appeal in her heart-shaped face and currently out-of-vogue, hourglass proportions. He caught himself beginning to lick his lips and then bit it back. Patience was another of his father’s lessons, and he was still of the mind to take them for unnuanced, face-value.

Just as the final sweet notes trickled from his and her fingers, there was an insistent wrapping at the front door of the home. Caroline bolted up from her upholstered seat and hurried down the hall. Buck only caught a last flash of her ankle and heel when he looked away from the music and his audience clapped politely for their performance.

A long moment later, Caroline returned, her hand dragging along a tall young man with flaxen-blond hair and a large Adam’s apple who was just taking off his cap. Buck recognized him as a junior at the local high school and a star on the basketball team. The eldest Gardner girl smiled winningly at her catch.

“Mr. and Mrs. Barnes, this is Frank Jorgansen,” Caroline twittered.

Buck nearly opened his mouth to voice his rebuttal that Frank Jorgansen had _not_ been on the list of invitations to his party when his mother rose from her chair and offered her hand in warm greeting. When his father took his turn, Buck witnessed his mother lock eyes with him and give her boy a small and private shake of the head. He was not to make a fuss, not while under the Gardner’s own roof; that much was certain.

The day seemed almost ruined for reasons he couldn’t begin to explain to himself or his parents or his friends. He just glared at the black and white keys of the piano and his own hands that he willed not to clench.

“Bucky?” Lucy whispered next to him, conspiratorily close. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothin’,” he responded, shrugging his shoulders. He didn’t want to look again at the room’s occupants. Not until his pulse calmed itself and the sour taste left his mouth, or Caroline and her beau left the room.

Bird-light fingers rested on the knuckles of his right hand, and he blinked forcefully to be sure he actually could verify with his eyes what he felt. Lucy’s palm rested on the back of his hand. He was then acutely aware of where her leg touched his own. 

“You should see the daffodils in the garden,” the girl murmured. “It’s not even mid-March and their blooming.”

“Okay,” he got out and with Lucy rose from the piano bench. “That’d be great.”

“I’m going to show Bucky the bulbs we planted last year,” Lucy said with uncharacteristic resoluteness. “Mother,” the girl continued formally, addressing Virginia. “Would you send Pearl or Sarah out to get us when the guests arrive?”

The second wife of the Lieutenant seemed mildly surprised from the request, her eyebrows lifting over her coffee cup. “Certainly, Lucille.”

Determined not to be completely speechless in the subtle drama, Buck pushed the bench further back and offered Lucy his arm for her to entwine hers in. “Miss,” he entreated, and the ten-year-old took him up, walking out of the parlor as stately as if she had been a European aristocrat. “Pardon us,” Buck excused as he escorted Lucy closely passed Caroline and Frank Jorgensen, schooling his face so as to seem completely unconcerned with anything that anyone thought of him.

Buck finally exited the house with Lucy through the back door, and they wandered down a little groomed stone path into the back gardens of the property surrounded a high wooden fence. He finally allowed himself a full-on scowl of displeasure, dropping his arm and hers. He wouldn’t forget his manners entirely, though.

“Thanks, Lu,” he said, but didn’t meet the girl’s face, however much he usually liked studying it. The noonish sun was bright even though the air was still a little crisp. He looked at her shadow instead as he worked his toe along the edge of cobblestone, wishing he had a stick to whittle, something to harmlessly bite the edge of his pocket-knife into.

“She gets bored easily,” Lucy explained.

The boy just scoffed. “Obviously.”

“Buck, please don’t mind her. She’s not mean, just...careless. She’s always been like that.”

He shook his head, half out of frustration and half out of disbelief that as self-involved as Caroline was, Lucy was still prompted to defend her. He had always figured that is what family should do for one another; it just seemed between the two sisters to be rather one-sided.

Stopping himself from doing any more damage to the Gardner’s lawn, he dug his hands deep into his pockets and looked back up to his companion.

“Well, I guess when a girl kisses a boy it doesn’t really make her his. Not really. Is that how it goes?” he asked. Not that he quite thought Caroline’s kiss those two years ago was a testament of devotion, but it had been his very first. And he didn’t want so much an answer to his particular question, as he was trying to figure out the real rules that adults used with one another, not what was just scripted in the radio serial dramas or on the silver-screen.

“I think it’s better to use words, even if someone has to say it first. Even if it’s really scary,” Lucy responded. Then she straightened up and frowned slightly, and Buck was utterly taken aback at the transformation. “And girls aren’t like bottle caps or sports trading cards, James Buchanan Barnes. We shouldn’t be _collected_ like a sheik does with a harem, or tossed away because someone grander or more sophisticated comes along.”

It felt like Lucy had caught him out cheating somehow in a game he had only played to one turn. It also seemed that her tirade wasn’t just about _him_. His mouth opened slightly and closed again. The girl had tears in her eyes, and he didn’t want to make it worse.

“Lu...I didn’t mean…” He sighed, and finally found what he wanted to say. “Lu, I’m sorry. I was just...used to being the only rooster in the henhouse, dancing with you both, week in and week out. I think I got jealous, and I don’t have the right to be. Because her kiss doesn’t mean anything. Not to her. Not to me.”

His fingers found the handkerchief he had stuffed in his pocket earlier that day, and even though it was rumpled, he offered it to her. The girl wiped her eyes and her nose with it in rough swipes rather than dainty dabs.

Buck determined to tell Lucy how much he liked her later, some other day, when she wasn’t upset and her older sister wasn’t the focus of their conversation.

“You feel up to showin’ me those daffodils?” he offered, hoping it would turn the mood. “Maybe we can ask your parents if we can put some on the table for the party?”

Bravely, he held out his hand palm-up to her, and his heart sank when Lucy simply returned his kerchief. He put it away quickly, else she see the white-knuckled ball of a fist he hid momentarily in the folds of his pants.

“We’ve got crocuses, too,” Lucy sniffed her last. “I like them better. Especially the purple ones. They’re over in the other corner, where they get the most sun in the winter.”

* * *

The party itself was a blur to Buck of heaping amounts of confections and molded gelatins; there were games to be had where the dozen boys and handful of girls clustered in either the parlor or the formal dining room.

When the time came for his cake and presents, Caroline and her boyfriend were nowhere to be found. Buck simply wrote the Gardner girl off as he made his secret wish of his candles for a friend close enough to call ‘brother’ and began opening his gifts.

He anticipated the Boy Scout uniform from his parents and a new baseball glove given in Becca’s name. He thanked the Lieutenant for the adventure that morning in the biplane, the tales of it already creating a buzz that would continue well into next week at school. As a token of the day, the Gardners also gave him an aviator’s wristwatch made in Europe and engraved with ‘JBB’ on the back, which had Buck feeling a little abashed, sensing how expensive it was.

“Just take good care of it, my son,” William Gardner pronounced, and the boy swallowed down his emotions when he thanked the family again.

While everyone digested the cake and ice-cream, it was Peter and Harry, overcome with curiosity about the expanses of the home, that suggested a game of hide-and-seek. Buck immediately liked the notion, for he had an advantage over everyone but Lucy and Pearl, who knew her own home even better than he could.

“Sir? Mrs. Gardner? May we, if we stick to the first floor and the porch?”

Virginia looked to her husband with a sideways smile and lift of her eyebrow, and she must have saw something in his look. “One game, downstairs only.”

Buck bolted up from his seat, calling. “To one-hundred, and Peter’s _It_!” He disappeared from the dining room and into the hall before anyone else could beat him to the library, with its floor-to-ceiling bookcases and long velvety curtains. There was one particular window in the corner next to a standing electric lamp with a beautiful glass shade that would be easily overlooked.

He could hear Peter’s faint counting as he slipped behind the folds of fabric and assured his feet were not visible.

Just as he settled, the door suddenly opened, and Buck stifled an inhale of surprise. By his estimation, it had only been to the count of twenty.

“I’m sure Father keeps some scissors in here!” came Caroline’s voice, insistent. He heard the slide of cabinet and desk drawers.

Another set of unfamiliar footsteps was on her heels, long and a bit heavy. “He also keeps the cognac in the library, right?” Now two were rifling through the furniture. Buck lost count of the game.

“Ahah!” Frank exclaimed, tone thick with triumph. “Found it!”

“The scissors?”

“Something better,” her beau pronounced, and there was a faint tinkling of leaded glass.

“Put it back!” Caroline hissed.

“What’s the harm, doll? Soon your Pops gonna have me over for cards anyway.” Suddenly, things got very still in the room. “And you weren't saying ‘No’ at Madge’s party last week, to _anything._ ”

“Frank,” the girl breathed, seemingly half exasperated and half...something else.

There was a groan of wood, as if something of weight had been set down on the wide bureau and it complained ever-so-slightly.

Slowly, Bucky reached up a hand and pulled the curtain away from his right eye. His pulse was up and he hoped that his breathing wasn’t giving him away. He didn’t know quite what to do, and so the best course seemed to be to remain quiet and unobserved.

Frank and Caroline were at profile to him, her sitting on top of the leather-covered desk and the young man so close to her there wasn’t even a half-step between them. Regardless of the angle, she wouldn’t have seen Buck anyway with her eyes closed and chin tilted up to the ceiling. The blond was also nuzzling into the slender pillar of the girls neck in a way that caused his shoulders to tense under his shirt. That wasn’t all. With his large basketballer’s hand, he kneaded the small left breast of the Gardner girl until she made a little noise like a whine. 

Buck’s cheeks felt on fire but the rest of him was frozen as he witnessed Frank’s other hand begin at Caroline’s delicate knee, then creep up and disappear under the hem of her dress. The girl didn’t struggle or complain; rather her thighs parted ever-so-slightly. Her heels rattled against the wood paneling.

“Just a swig, darlin’,” Frank cooed. “That’s all I’m askin’.”

Whatever her boyfriend did with his hands next caused Caroline to quickly clutch at his back, gasp and give a slightly higher, more vocal cry. It wasn’t pain on her face, nor panic. Color bloomed on the apples below her eyes.

“Maybe just a taste,” she whispered raggedly back.

The Barnes boy tingled all-over at the sight, their hushed words, and he began to become keenly aware of a stirring below his own waist, a tightening of his pants. There were so many things _wrong_ about all of it; wrong with Frank pawing through the Lieutenant’s valuables in more ways than one; wrong with Buck being in the same room, spying unwillingly and finding his maturing body strangely thrilled at all the indiscretions and the transgressions.

Buck should be doing something to reveal himself before it went further, but he was half-mesmerized, half-cowed.

Caroline began reaching for the crystalline decanter on the edge of the bureau when the hallway erupted with the thumps of jogging feet.

“I know you’re in there, Bucky Barnes!” came Peter’s call just soon before he opened the library door. It was just enough time for Buck to release his hold on the curtains again, for Frank to pull away from her, and for Caroline to hop down from her seat, smoothing down her hemline.

Peter’s steps paused abruptly. “Oh, excuse me!” the boy blurted, sensing he had interrupted something. “You didn’t happen to see Bucky hide in here?”

Caroline sniffed, annoyance clear in her tone. “No, we didn’t. You check in the pantry? Sarah wouldn’t give him away, so you have to check the kitchen yourself.”

“The pantry. Right,” Peter said, ever indication of belief as he then walked out, leaving the two high schoolers alone with their secret observer.

Something scraped on the desk and he heard a light smack and a hiss from Frank, as if she had swiped at his hand reaching for the contraband liquor or her chest. “Not now,” Caroline admonished. “I have to finish wrapping Buck’s gift.”

“Fine,” he grumbled. “I gotta take a piss anyway.” 

The door closed again, and Buck counted his heartbeats, waiting till fifty to peek out again and see if they all had left. But before he got into ten of his tally, Caroline called. “You can come out, Valentino. I know you’re behind the curtain near the lamp. It’s one of Lucy’s favorite spots, too.”

He didn’t want to move. He still felt a very odd sensation in his groin, and he didn’t want Caroline to see him like that.

With a huff and a quick few paces, the girl tore the curtains away from him, and he tried his best to turn and press himself as far as he could into the wall. He couldn’t meet her face as he swallowed, ashamed.

“Don’t be embarrassed, James,” she chided. “It’s not like I haven’t seen boys worked up. It happens at the parties all the time.”

“Not birthday parties, I hope,” he responded somberly, looking at her over his shoulder.

Caroline giggled delightedly, finding something highly amusing. “I didn’t mean to start your education that way, but Frank’s harmless.” Her hand flighted dismissively in the air. “I meant to start it like with everything else, a book. But I couldn’t find scissors to wrap the damn thing. So here…”

She turned back towards the desk, and the boy was finally able to regain enough self-control he could extract himself from the hiding place and walk up to her without debilitating embarrassment. Caroline held out a hardcover book to him, and he took it in his hands, turning it over to read the spine. It smelled and felt freshly printed.

“Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman,” he pronounced, rubbing the back of his neck uncertainly. “Didn’t he die back in the 1890’s or something?” Buck was dubious about what a poet from the last century could teach him about the very new, stirring, and uncomfortable feelings he had lately.

Caroline tisked, tossing her shortly styled hair. “Just read it, Bucky. Alone. Let the words sink in and let your imagination help you. All the best lovers, like all the best poets, have an imagination greater than the skies.”

So the boy, at the very end of the most exciting day he had ever had in his twelve years, flipped open the pages of the work and began to read the collection. His eyes grew quickly heavy and lidded, and just before he nodded-off, the voice of Whitman intoned in his skull:

_And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said,_  
 _Know'st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards?_  
 _And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,_  
 _The making of perfect soldiers._  



	16. Chapter 16

Even without his birthday wish coming true, the spring and summer of 1929 did well enough by Bucky Barnes. He took his baseball practice seriously and became a rising talent on the Legion baseball team as a pitcher. The constant activity was good for helping him keep his coordination even though his bones lengthened faster than his muscles could fill them out again.

Unfortunately, there was nothing that could be done for his voice. In the second month after his birthday, Buck found his own throat revolting against him, sometimes dropping down into tones he had not heard from himself before, and other times returning haphazardly to his boyish register. It bothered him so much that he tried to speak as little as possible while in public, although he knew that many other boys his age also were going through it. Thankfully, it was supposed to be temporary, and his sister didn’t make fun of him.

The undependability of his voice frustrated him so much that he hadn’t found the moxie yet to telling Lucy that he admired her. They were too young to date anyway, so Buck thought that he’d just wait a little longer, maybe a few years, before making a proper courtship of it.

At the league home games, Lucy sat with her school friends. When Buck would throw her a wide smile as he got off the bench, her companions tittered and looked bashful. Despite the numerous changes to his body of late, he managed to get girls’ attention.

“You’re getting to be a looker, James,” his mother confirmed one evening while his father attended Lieutenant Gardner’s evening of cards and cigars. “Take care with your affections, otherwise you will break more hearts than you ever intend.”

“I don’t understand,” he admitted. “I mean...I won’t lie to anyone.”

“It’s very complicated,” she continued, and there was something in her eyes that changed. “A girl can do foolish things to capture the attention of a handsome boy, and it is human nature to simply allow it because it feels good and right in the moment. Remember that they may not all be Lieutenants’ or Colonels’ daughters, but they still have fathers that deserve your respect just as much.”

Bucky was certain that Lucy didn’t want to be treated with dignity because of who her father was, but because of who _she_ was, but he kept close-lipped. The conversation with his mother was one of the first times he recalled having a difference of opinion with his parents. He wasn’t going to argue with them on this matter, for even though the cause may be different, the resulting carefulness and consideration would be the same.

Still, it was easy to see how the rush of attraction could blind anyone’s judgement. The new and strange emotions that came upon Buck at unusual moments was not so much frightening as mysterious, and rather than try to beat back or ignore the sensations that swelled and flooded in him, he thought to simply let the waves carry him to whatever shore they deemed. 

Thanks to Caroline’s clandestine birthday gift in the _Leaves of Grass_ , Buck now had words for these aches and impulses, erotic phrases that if he set his imagination upon them he’d find himself awash in a dizziness that was part excitement and part hunger. Quietly and privately in his own room, he learned how to meet the needs of his cravings without guilt. If a long-dead but brilliant poet could revel in the body without shame, why couldn’t he? He certainly wasn’t hurting anyone, breaking the Lord’s commandments, or violating any of the pledges he given as a scout.

One night, while on the edge of sleep, Buck decided that when his voice finally evened out, he’d ask the eldest Gardner daughter to finally teach him the tango.


	17. Chapter 17

It happened in the third week of October that year, just a few days after his sister’s birthday. The day was calm and clear and sunny, and Buck was a bit bored with his afternoon geometry lesson, thinking it would be a great day to try out his new model airplane. He planned that as soon as school was over for the day, he’d rush home and take it out for a test-flight. Then, after his supper, he’d study for his First Aid merit badge.

All these things were in his mind when the principal interrupted class in order to take him out. The instructions to clear his desk and get his coat and lunch pail were solemnly delivered, and as he did so, there was a growing pit in his stomach. When the principal escourted him into the silent hallway, Buck didn’t quite know what to expect, but he knew it was going to be bad.

“Son, there has been an accident at the fort,” the administrator explained. “Your father is injured. I need you to come with me and collect your sister. I’ll drive you both home.”

Buck swallowed, shaking his head in disbelief. His feet moved behind the aging administrator of their own accord. “An accident? What happened?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t have the details. Your mother is home with friends of your family; they can explain more.”

When Buck went into his sister’s class, he couldn’t bring himself to worry her overly much. “We have to go home early today, Becca,” was all he could say.

“Why?” she asked, frowning at to her brother. “Have you been bad?”

Gravely, Bucky shook his head. Any other day he’d probably crack a joke. “No. Something’s happened.” He spared a look at Pearl, who was staring at him with her wide green eyes. In fact, all the class was fixed on him, including the teacher. “Come on. Quickly. Principal Kincaid is giving us a ride, and we don’t want to make him wait.”

The ride home in the back of the strange automobile was short but excruciating. An accident could be anything. An injury could be anything. He wouldn’t know till he knew, getting the full story from his mother. His gut was balled, the tendons in his shoulders tighter than a bowstring, and he forced himself to remain calm for his sister’s sake.

Later, he couldn’t remember the administrator telling them that they were dismissed from school for the next week, or getting out of the vehicle, or opening the front door. The first thing he could recall about the journey from the street to the living room was that his mother was slouched over in George Barne’s favorite chair, with Virginia Gardner holding her hand. Becca ran to her, her malleable child’s face already set to cry as she called, “Mommy? Mommy?!”

The battery commander, whom Buck knew as Captain Hargrave, rose from the couch, his hat in his hands. “James, please come with me into the kitchen,” he said soberly. “Mrs. Gardner will take care of your sister.”

When the door swung closed, Buck noticed oddly that the dishes were still half-done, and there were potatoes, unpeeled, scattered on the floor.

The boy forced himself to breathe, even though he wanted to be like Becca and rush into his mother’s arms. He was the eldest, and he had to set his childish fears aside and be there for his family, as his father would want.

“Sir, what happened at the fort?” he asked, before the Captain spoke himself. At least he looked Bucky in the eye.

“We had a live ammunition exercise today with one of the new howitzer prototypes. There was a misfire in the breech. We are still investigating. Two men died and your father…” The man shook his head, frowning deeper. “Your father sustained significant injuries to his head and torso. He’s being transferred to a hospital in Oklahoma City as we speak. The medical officer that evaluated him thinks he’ll make it through, but...James, I’m sorry. There is a good chance that he may never see again or return to active duty.”

“Oh,” was all that he heard himself say. “Is that all, Sir?”

“Son, I truly am sorry. The Army will pay for all his medical care, and I will personally oversee the investigation and find any who may have been negligent. Your family will be taken care of; there are pensions for debilitated service men.”

His knees were locked in place. The words competed with the sound of blood rushing in his ears.

“Am I dismissed, Sir?”

Captain Hargrave’s mouth opened like he intended to say something else consolatory, but then a troubled look passed over his face. “Yes, Private Barnes,” he finally answered. “At ease.”

The boy found himself kneeling on the kitchen floor, picking up the potatoes like he had picked up his sister’s blocks when they were younger, cradling them in the crook of his arm. When he got to his feet again, the battery commander was gone. There were voices in the living room and he couldn’t make out what they were saying. Slowly, meticulously, Bucky laid the vegetables one-by-one on the kitchen table in a neat and orderly row, like cadets at attention. 

He needed to be strong for his sister and mother. He needed to be the family’s soldier now. And so when he finally joined the others in the living room, he got the details of the hospital and arranged for either Caroline or Lieutenant Gardner to drive them that evening. They could stay at the Gardners’ friends’ home there, the very one that owned the civilian biplane that Buck had flown in just eight months before. He packed a suitcase for himself, including a few familiar books, and also helped his sister with her things as well. Becca started crying again, absolutely overwhelmed with a child’s confusion, and Buck held it together well enough to soothe her.

His parent’s bedroom door was mostly closed when he went to his mother again to report that he and his sister were ready for the journey. Winifred was seated on the edge of the bed, holding the hat of his father’s dress uniform. She was fixated on it like Buck had stared at the potatoes in the kitchen.

“Mother?” he inquired.

Her eyes were bloodshot red and her fair skin blotchy, but she sniffed and tried to smile at her son.

“What is it, dear?”

He sat down beside her on the bed. “I wanted to let you know that Becca and I are packed for Oklahoma City.”

Her eyes were brimming with tears again as she looked at him. “You’re so grown up, James,” she offered, pride mingling with her grief. “I’m sorry if...If you’re going to have to grow up even faster now.” A sob suddenly came up from her throat, and another, and she bowed her head.

Buck hugged his mom then and didn’t let her go for a long time. “I’ll be okay, Mom. We’ll all be okay. Even Pop.”

The boy refused to cry that day or any day during his father's recovery. He wouldn’t stop soldiering until Sergeant George Barnes came home. Buck pondered and dreaded upon the question of just how much of his father had been lost on the field that day along with those two other men, and would never, ever return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You knew there had to be some sort of catalyst to bring James to Brooklyn, right? Well, here we are. A nod to Bucky's comic origin story, as well as a nod to Chris Evan's stunt double (because I need to pick names from somewhere!)


	18. Chapter 18

When Bucky and his mother visited the hospital that evening, the boy didn’t know what to expect. Medical practice was foreign to him except for his Boy Scout training in first aid. A nurse greeted them in the sparse lobby and lead them both to meet with the senior physician in charge of his father’s care. A lead surgeon, Dr. David Levinstein brought them first to his office and not to his father’s bedside.

There were details Buck needed to pay attention to, so he willed himself not to bounce his knee up and down in nervous anticipation and to sit up straight and calm. There was a clean handkerchief in his pocket; he didn’t need to panic because that bit of soft white cotton could clean up a dozen messes. That thought is what got him through. Dr. Levinstein described the amount of shrapnel that had been extracted from his father’s body in emergency surgery. Winifred Barnes took in a shivering breath and then swallowed.

“All of the visible debris has been removed, but there is still a good probability of infection, which will need to be monitored and managed,” the doctor explained. “We elected to enucleate, that’s remove, the left eye to lessen the chance for infection. However the right may still retain some light sensitivity. I recommend at least a six-week stay. After that period it may be that, if all is well, the last of his recovery can occur at home. For now, he is under good nursing care; the extent of his rehabilitation is in the hands of God.”

It occurred to Bucky that he had squandered his birthday wish. He should have been less selfish, and asked for the continued health, well-being, and happiness of his family. Was he still young enough that the Lord and Savior counted him innocent, or did the proclivities he indulged his hungry mind and his greedy body in already make him an unfavored sinner?

The doctor continued as they were escorted to his father’s ward, “He is under heavy sedation, to ease his discomfort. Don’t expect him to be able to speak clearly.” 

There were other beds there of polished chrome and white bleached sheets and empty except for a few patients, who were given an amount of privacy with long half-drawn curtains. A couple of nurses in their white uniforms and caps dipped in and out, tending to the ill.

When the doctor paused just outside of one particular set of curtains, Bucky didn’t. He needed go first, before his mother.

The man that rested there, propped in reclining sit by pillows, could hardly be recognized as George Barnes. Bandages obscured every part of his face but his chin and lips, and even though they looked to have been changed at least once since his surgery, they were already darkened in spots. His torso wasn’t much better off, but one arm, his left, was relatively untouched with only a few nicks. That was the hand Bucky touched. He had no idea whether his father was awake or asleep, with what remained of his eyes covered.

“Pop,” he called, just as his mother entered. “Pop, Mom and I are here.”

A soft moan was all that the man could answer with. When Buck cast his gaze back to his mother, he witnessed her go immediately unsteady on her feet, and although her son was not quick enough to react the doctor was; he immediately guided her into a chair. The boy felt torn then, between concern for his mother who was reaching the end of her resilience, and deep worry for his father, who had nearly died during a routine artillery test today.

“We’re going to be here while you get better, Father,” Buck continued. “Then we’ll take you home.”

* * *

That week, Buck stayed with his mother and sister in the home of Lieutenant Gardner’s friend, and had he not been entirely consumed with his father’s recovery and doing what he could for his family, he could have spent hours upon hours talking to Mr. Wiley Post. The man had ambitions of breaking flight speed and altitude records and wealthy oil patrons willing to fund him.

Oddly enough, Mr. Post was blind in one eye from an oil-rig accident several years ago, but that didn’t stop him from taking his settlement and buying the Curtiss Canuck biplane that would launch him into aviation.

There were a lot of pictures on Mr. Post’s walls of him with all types of airplanes and him with important people. Mostly, the haze of Buck’s worry for his family curbed his interest, but one particular shone out to him.

“Is that…?” he began to inquire, amazed.

“Will Rogers? Yes, m’boy. He and I go back to my barnstorming days.”

It was enough for Buck to crack a small, tentative smile. He was in the presence of giants, but being one himself was not within him. Not now. Not with such brutal truths that a soldier could survive the stitching of thousands of bullets, the chemical haze that peeled flesh, the percussion of a barrage of artillery, only to be crippled in a time of peace by one’s own device. It was fundamentally unfair. 

In the boy, a dark notion took root: that God cared nothing for warriors or their causes; valor and duty were shams. It was a blasphemy that grieving and furious souls could grasp and never let go.

In the early part of his recovery, George Barnes was still groggy from the morphine used to ease his bodily pain. Buck read him the daily paper, and it became a ritual of theirs. His father smiled sometimes as his son flipped and folded the newsprint.

 _Billions Lost In Stock Market Crash_ was the printed main headline that Wednesday morning. Buck recited the news slowly, and his father let out a low and deep groan as he shifted in his bed that seemed somehow different than the discomforted noises he made from his injuries alone.

“Father?”

He reached blindly for his son’s hand and when he found it, the man clenched it tightly. “James, go back...to school.”

“No, Pop. I gotta stay here with you. Help Mom.”

“Go back,” his father repeated, more resolute. “An order. Rebecca too.”

Buck then turned and looked to his mother who was seated in the very same spot Dr. Levinstein had eased her into upon their first visit. Even with his father’s directive, he was uncertain what to do. She set down her knitting slowly.

“I’ll telegraph Virginia Gardner,” Winifred offered, her long-fingered hand resting ever-so-lightly on her stomach as she gazed briefly out the window of the hospital ward. “You and your sister may be able to stay with them for a time. Until the situation is finally settled.”

There was something in his mother’s tone that made Buck uneasy. What situation? He knew his mother had been corresponding frantically of late, including a number of daily telegrams to his relatives along with lengthier letters. A cousin in Indiana. His aunt Janet in New York. 

“Can’t Becca and I stay by ourselves?” he countered. After all, he was more than twelve-and-a-half now.

“You could for an evening, my dear. But not for days, with no one to feed you.”

His father nodded his head, agreeing.

“Mrs. Gardner has already said that Rebecca would be a delight to have in her home. I think the lieutenant likes a young man around, too. Helps even out the numbers,” his mother offered in the way of a glimmer of humor. “I’ll wire her after my appointment with one of the Dr. Levinstein’s colleagues.”

Buck’s eyebrows raised. “What...what appointment?” He suddenly felt panicked again. Was his mother ill? He noticed her appetite for breakfast was often limited, and she sometimes had to excuse herself suddenly to use the bathroom. Buck thought it was simply because she was so nervous about her husband’s condition, but now his mind conjured other scenarios. There were so many sicknesses that had no cure. He didn't want to be an orphan; he couldn't be that brave.

“A check-up. Nothing else, James. Please don’t worry.”

He really tried not to and was relieved when his mother returned to the Post’s, assuring him enigmatically that all was as it should be. Her face seemed oddly radiant, even through the trials and long hours of sitting at her husband’s bedside.

That evening, he and Becca were to return to their hometown and stay in the Gardner's guest room. When Caroline picked them up, she seemed also distracted and worried. Finally, Buck was able to put two-and-two together. In the seat, he shifted his sister on his lap, who refused to let go of him when they said goodbye to their mother. Keeping her close was the only way to keep her from hysterics.

“You...you had investments, didn’t you?” he asked Caroline, having an inkling how securities work because he had been curious about them since the girl had foisted _The Great Gatsby_ on him that summer. At the time, she found it amusing that the love interest of the title character was surnamed ‘Buchanan’.

“Yes, my father and Virginia. We...used a lot of her inheritance,” the girl answered, staring pointedly down the ribbon of packed earth before them.

“But the Lieutenant. He still has his post, right? You _can_ still get along? Even without your fancy magazines and your fancy dresses?” he asked, bitterly. Buck was angry that Caroline’s father could still make a living, while his was crippled for the rest of his life. He shouldn’t have said something so unkind, but the boy’s ability to speak politely had been sapped from him by the week’s trials.

“Let’s not forget the fancy boarding school you were going to be sent to next year, right, Barnes?” she retorted with just as much vitriol.

The _what?_ The surprise must have been palpable to her, because she then just waved her hand and engaged the auto’s headlights before the twilight overtook their journey. “Talk to my father when we get back. I wasn’t supposed to be eavesdropping.”

“Alright,” Buck agreed, just loud enough over the din of the road and the vehicle’s engine. The rest of the trip, he just looked out the window at the Oklahoma fields. Their tires and those of other travelers kicked up dust that seemed to blow across the flat expanse for miles. It seemed to him that his own life was just as crushed and powdered and given to capricious fates as that soil.

Absently, he stroked his sister's hair to soothe her and him, and thought again that he should have made a different birthday wish.


	19. Chapter 19

With his sister Rebecca still in his arms, Caroline pulled into the Gardners’ drive well after dark. As his feet touched the ground, Buck had a pang of guilt that he should be back in Oklahoma City, sitting at his father’s bedside. The man had ordered his children to return to their schooling, and however wounded he may have been, George Barnes still was the ranking officer in his family.

Supper had been saved for them by the housekeeper, even though no one was of a mind to eat much. The news of Tuesday’s market crash weighed on everyone but Pearl, but she was old enough to know that her own friend was very sad about her father and treated Becca with kind words and offered her hugs. At least, Buck thought dimly, Pearl was turning out to be more like Lucy than Caroline in her temperament.

It was the first time he had seen the middle Gardner girl since the news of the accident, and sitting in the parlor with the family, listening to further news from New York about the massive stock sell-off yesterday, he didn’t know quite what to say to the one he secretly admired. He just felt all battered and bruised inside, as if he himself had been through something rougher than an after-school scuff-up, and he didn’t want his troubles to spill on her, not when she already carried around the burdens of her own quiet sadness.

So many ‘should haves’ buzzed in his head like radio static. He should have declared his feelings months ago; he should have picked her May-time wildflowers; he should have used his spending money to buy her treats at the soda fountain; he should have asked if he could hold her hand as they walked home from school. How could he make Lucille Eleanor Gardner happy when he was now so miserable?

“Buck,” Lieutenant Gardner called him back from his brooding. “Come with me to the library, son. We need to discuss a few things, as men to men.”

“Yes, Sir,” he responded, sensing all eyes on him as he left the parlor just behind the man he entertained as a second-father of sorts. Another time, it may have given him pleasure to be referred by the lieutenant as a ‘man’, but now that maturity just felt like a leaden burden.

The compact and sharp-eyed pilot sat at his desk, and Bucky tentatively sat down at one of the other upholstered seats that faced over the expansive plane of wood. He heard the faint tinkling of glass from where the man lifted the crystal decanter and two matching glasses.

“Back before this prohibition nonsense, gentlemen discussed business and politics over a decent brandy,” he began to explain, pulling the stopper and pouring an inch-and-a-half of the rich amber spirits in each vessel. “Have you ever indulged?”

Buck shook his head. “No,” he responded, uncertain. He had seen both the prohibition propaganda films about the dangers of alcohol and also witnessed in the moving pictures how glamorous the speak-easies and their patrons were.

“When I was your age, boys and girls were allowed wine or beer for a special occasion, before we ever touched the good stuff. Rye whiskey’s my favorite, but now you have to find a Canadian supplier for it.” The lieutenant offered him one of the glasses. “Wish it could be that, my boy, but this will have to do. Start slowly.”

To Buck, the cognac tasted a bit like the medicine his mother once gave him for a cough he had way back when he was eight. But it was also just a bit sweet and oaken and the liquid warmed his throat as it made its descent. He wasn’t quite sure he liked it, but that was the way it had been with coffee, too.

“First, your father takes great pride in his uniform and his service. No amount of money from a pension is going to ever return his eyes to him, and no amount of suffering is going to snuff out that patriotism. More importantly, _nothing,_ not even an accident like this, is ever going to take away his love for you and his conviction that you could be a great officer someday. He’ll continue to do everything in his power to see you become one.”

Buck just took another hard swallow of his drink. Men like Sergeant George Barnes didn’t go about coddling their sons with such words as ‘love’, and Buck had grown up never expecting it. But it felt a relief somehow to finally know it, confirm it with someone who knew his father better than most.

“Is this about the boarding school?” the boy asked, feeling his curiosity dulled but not broken.

“Yes. Your father had thought with the market as it was performing, that he could take a portion of the family savings and make enough on investments to fund your tuition into a military prep academy,” William Gardner answered. “I offered to pay for a quarter, and consider it my own patriotic duty.”

“But now...now’s he lost the investment,” Buck wagered. “And even then…” He bit his bottom lip briefly, tasting the liquor again there. “Sir, please tell me the truth. Is my family going to be able to live on the Army’s pension like the way we do now?”

The man laced his hands together, and leaned on his desk. “Does your family have a mortgage on your house?”

Suddenly, Bucky felt a little dizzy. He set down his empty glass and clutched the edge of the desk. “I don’t know. I think...yes.”

The lieutenant frowned and poured him another helping. “Then you better drink up, son, because your family is in for some rough times ahead. My wife and I will do what we can to help, but from what Virginia tells me, you’re mother has her eyes set on New York City and her sister there...Jane?”

“Janet,” Buck answered, now beyond caution with his drink, taking a deep swallow of it. “Aunt Janet Reynolds.” He had never met her or her husband. Only got birthday wishes and the yearly small Christmas gifts she sent to him and his sister.

“Look at it this way, James. My eldest would almost sell her soul to be back East again. You’ll be in the heart of the greatest city on earth. They’ll be plenty of opportunities there for you to support your family. Hell, West Point is just up the Hudson if it all works out.”

The Barnes boy wasn’t thinking about West Point or Caroline’s jealousy. He was thinking to Lucy, whom now was all but lost to him. He swore he wouldn’t cry for his father, but by God, he wanted to cry for her. Buck stared at the bookcases behind the lieutenant’s shoulder, feeling another wound on his already battle-weary heart. Still, there was something in how the alcohol was affecting him that loosened his hold on his tongue.

“Sir, why is Lucy so sad about her mother?” he finally asked.

The middle-aged man sighed, and it seemed that it was his turn to become glassy-eyed. “Anne died in giving birth to her. She’s blamed herself since she’s known, when my eldest couldn’t hold her temper one day and decided that it would be excellent ammunition in their fights.”

Buck just swallowed, feeling even more morose. “I never fight with my sister.”

William Gardner shook his head. “If you’re moving to Brooklyn and are trying to recoup some of your family savings, trust me, you’re going to fight with your sister about that piano.”

The prospect of selling or leaving most of their possessions behind in Oklahoma was almost too much for the boy. Buck felt his free hand clench and unclench on the arm of the chair. Only the booze now flush in his system kept him enough sedated he didn’t tear out into the night to look for some kind of trouble. One day it would be too much; one day and he wouldn’t be able to contain this despair and rage. And God help the person that wronged him on that day.

He cleared his throat, summoning the soldier’s detachment, even if it was all a lie. “Sir. Thank you for the straight talk. I should...I need to go to bed.”

Buck rose, and it seemed very adult to slam back the dregs of his drink and then quickly pound the bottom of the glass back down on the table. He probably saw that in a movie once. The lieutenant’s mouth twitched a frown.

“Goodnight, James.”

Lucy caught him on the way up the stairs. He had to be careful about his ascent, because his feet were no longer steady. She was in her nightclothes, her beautiful chestnut hair in a braid just like his mothers. He stormed past her. He had to. The last thing he caught was the white of her widened eyes.

“Bucky?” she asked to his back, the same gentle concern echoing again.

“Not now, Lu,” he growled, knowing where the guest bedroom was and flinging open the door only to slam it behind him. There was a beast within him, an angry beast, and the only thing Buck could do was to lock himself in this space as quickly as he could and try to keep all the good people away from him.

Fully clothed, he threw himself on the bed, found a pillow and then buried his face so tightly in it to block out any of the last light. He screamed into that pillow, again and again, and let his fist beat into the mattress. It would be too easy for those screams to turn into sobs, but he refused to let that kind of weakness claim him, else he never come back from it.

He finally found some sort of control again when his throat was ragged and the last drams of brandy worked through his system. It was only after the house was quiet that he went to the bathroom, washed his face, brushed his teeth, and woodenly forced himself to change into his nightclothes. He couldn’t imagine sleeping that night.

New York City. The center of finance. The Big Apple. He was terrified because he loved the open sky, and the lake, and the muddy winding creek with the cottonwood and elms. There would be none of that there.

But there was the Yankees and Babe Ruth in that city. 

“Alright, Buck,” he whispered to himself, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s the second home game of the season, and you’ve got a seat. Doesn’t matter. Any seat. And it’s a sunny day, and a double header. You don’t have to be there. You _want_ to be there.”

He continued his fancy, conjuring the experience wholecloth, even the pencil and the scorecard, until it was real and inviting and so much like a dream of a perfect day that the golden beauty of it could compete with the grief, and the fun-loving boy could reassert himself against the dark beast.


	20. Chapter 20

In the following weeks, the solitary rages that Buck had over his family’s fate became fewer and fewer. He now was resigned to the fact that as soon as his father was fit for travel, the family would take a train to New York to live with Aunt Janet Reynolds and her husband in the Brooklyn home his mother had grown up in. The Barnes’ family automobile, the piano, and nearly all of the home furnishings were to be sold at ‘pennies for the dollar’ in an auction; few regular folks had any real cash they were willing to spend given all the turmoil with the markets and the lending banks, and even the neighbors and fellow servicemen were wary to spend on anything but necessities. His family should have stayed in Oklahoma, Buck thought, but for the pension that could never cover their costs.

In the Army’s official investigation, the cause of the accident that blinded Sergeant George Barnes was determined as a manufacturing flaw, an impurity in the shell’s cast-metal casing. It had been the only one defected out of thousands of perfect shells and thus, according to the lawyer from Oklahoma City, the factory was held blameless; the source of the metals could not be traced to a specific refinery, nor any negligence evident. Without ability to sue, all that was left to the Barnes’ family was to cut their losses. Their house could not be sold for greater than what was owed upon it, and it was that lawyer’s advice for the Barnes’ family would leave it to the bank, to _walk away_ from the debt. Buck hated that idea as much as he was certain his father did.

Still, Buck was determined to be a pillar of strength for Becca and his mother. His sister and he visited his father on the weekends, and George Barnes was slowly becoming more coherent as he healed. Buck still read the paper aloud whenever on his visits, but it seemed the nation had little in the way of good news, now-a-days.

Buck had two trunks in which to pack his belongings, and one was mostly for his clothes. The other, he pondered on. His books, which included many of them Caroline’s illicit presents, he could take, but his model airplanes or the crystal radio was unlikely survive the trip. And his Daisy 25 air rifle? The city had few places where a boy could simply wander off and shoot some tin cans. Still, he didn’t want to sell it. It should be gifted instead.

The Gardner-Barnes Thanksgiving dinner was held late that day on account that they visited his father in the convalescent ward in the late morning. The occasion could have been grimmer, but Buck had an idea during the break between the main feast and the desserts, when they had all gathered in the parlor to ease back and digest.

Buck chose something from the vast collection of records that was sweet and slow, starting it spinning upon the electric player. Then he approached his mother and held out his hand.

“Mom, would you like to dance?” the boy asked.

The initial surprise on Winifred’s face transformed to a tentative and curious smile as she took up her son’s invitation. She rose to her feet and Buck folded her smoothly into a dance hold. He was of the same height as her now, but he knew height didn’t mean as much as a strong lead, especially with improvised figures. The foxtrot had infinite variables and most everyone knew the basic movements, and so he guided them both over the parlor floor with a natural ease that at first his mother seemed stiff to, but then relaxed and enjoyed as she realized how composed and talented her son was.

Soon, the Lieutenant had taken up Caroline, and Pearl and Becca got in on it too, though they really couldn’t figure out who should be leading between them. Only Lucy was left, a tentative smile on her lips, and Buck promised himself that she would be his next partner.

His mother’s eyes began to shine as she gazed at her eldest. They had just finished promenading when she leaned in closer, and said softly in his ear. “James, I meant to tell you and your sister over desserts, but this is sweet enough: you’ll have a new baby sister or brother next year.”

Buck nearly forgot the steps; he almost forgot to breathe. The music reminded him though, and his feet knew what to do better than he did. “That’s…” He swallowed, suddenly feeling panicked. “Mom, should you be _dancing?_ I mean with…”

“It’s alright, my son. A healthy woman in my condition can do most things up until the last month or so,” she said lowly. Buck offered her a slow turn in the next eight-count. Tucking his mother back in, he then spared a look down to her abdomen, which seemed a bit fuller, now that he thought of it. Even though she had lost weight elsewhere, since the accident. Buck wondered, worried then. Should she be eating more? If it hadn’t been that Winifred saw doctors for her own condition while she also tended her husband, he may have raised his concern.

Buck vaguely remembered holding his newborn sister in his arms when he was much, much younger and the wonder and joy he felt. That had been under the best of circumstances. Now he wondered how much of the decision to move to New York was based upon the needs of taking care of a new baby. A new brother? He should have been happier, but mostly his heart was caught in uncertainties.

“Mom, that’s amazing…” he began, but was at still at a loss for words. So as the song reached its final chords, he simply kissed her on the cheek. 

His mother smiled against his lips and she squeezed her son’s hand. “Now have a dance with that pretty girl on the couch there, James; and pray your heart or hers doesn’t break when we have to say goodbye.”

Sadly and secretly, Buck thought it was already too late for prayer.

* * *

It was early December when Buck and his sister were left alone overnight with the Gardner girls as their parents drove to Oklahoma City to visit with his recovering father and mother. They were all seeing the lawyer the next day, to finalize what would be done with the family’s finances. Buck was not yet sixteen, and thus had no legal say. His father, healing under constant care, was pronounced sound of mind again and could manage his estate. The auction date had been set. The Barnes family would have one last Christmas in their gutted home, and then before the New Year, make the great journey East.

That evening of solitude, after both Pearl and Rebecca had been put to bed, Caroline went on and on to Buck about the theater and jazz venues, the nightlife. “And don’t forget the public libraries. More books than you could read in a lifetime, Bucky Barnes.”

Lucy was practicing a classical piece on their baby grand that had her fingers and wrists pulsing over the keys. Buck thought it may be the strains of a ballet, innocuous and pretty at first, but then the arrangement shifted into something with just a touch of menace. The work of some Russian composer, he was almost certain.

Staring at the chandelier in the parlor’s ceiling, he just shrugged, and finally responded. “What’s the use anyway? All of it? I wish you could go instead, Caroline. I really do. And I could stay here.” _With your sister,_ he finished to himself.

The elder girl huffed and snapped close her magazine, perhaps the last edition she would have in a while. “I promised you one last lesson, and I’m generously offering you two,” she said, as if she was beholden to it against her wishes. “So are you going to sulk, or are you going to buck up, like your name?”

The piano went silent. Buck didn’t say a word.

Dauntless Caroline lived up to her name. “Girls in New York won’t fall for some country nitwit, so there’s your choice.”

Buck closed his eyes for a moment, and remembered that first April day when the would-be flapper pulled him from the porch into her parlor, the thrill of the older girl’s lips on his own. And even though he had grown wiser and more comfortable in the companionship of the opposite sex, in these past weeks flirtation was the last thing on his mind. Still, to accept felt like a bookend of sorts to Caroline’s strange initiation.

“Alright,” he said, sitting up.

“Then follow me,” Caroline said, walking into the hallway and towards the door. A coat-rack, hat-stand, and mirror were there, and the girl pointed to the silvery surface.

In the parlor, Lucy began a set of Christmas songs; she was practicing, no doubt, for the church Christmas pageant. 

“Face the mirror so you can see yourself. Pretend you have noticed an interesting young woman from across the table or the room. You want her to find you attractive and with a bit of mystery or danger. The secret is how you lock eyes with her.”

Buck stood in front of the mirror, with Caroline standing just behind him, coaching him, her hands resting lightly on his shoulders.

“Lower your chin, soften your gaze at the space between you. You can’t be staring at her from the start; first, think what it would be like to caress her with your mouth, even if you are just having polite conversation.”

He could feel his face warm at the girl’s intimate description, but still he maintained his gaze downward.

“When you are fairly certain her attention is directed at you for a moment, that’s when you lift your eyes, but not your chin,” Caroline continued. “Slowly, and let your eyes remain half-lidded. Drink her in; think to study the softness of her lips.”

Having no one to meet gazes with but Caroline’s reflection, he chose that as where to cast his glance. The mirror caught his attempt, the languid sweep of his dark lashes. The girl behind him inhaled sharply, chuckled, and shook her head.

“I stand corrected!” she exclaimed. “I think you’ll not have any trouble at all finding a pretty city girl for your arm, after all! Just practice it, perhaps with a bit of a smile at the end. Soon you’ll do it and not even notice.”

Buck lifted his head back to its normal tilt and asked. “So, that was the first lesson?”

Caroline squeezed his shoulders before releasing them. “That was the eyes, Bucky Barnes. Now, let’s talk about the tango, because that’s all about the hips.”

It was no wonder that the older girl had refused to teach him that dance until he was well on his way to thirteen, even though Buck had seen it performed by movie leads. The hold was closer, and it felt that every part of his body was like a telegraph wire to his partner. Not only was it signalling the tiny shifts of weight that would lead to variations of steps, but it seemed to communicate tension or trust, desire or disgust in a subtle, mercurial microcosm.

“It’s a Latin dance,” Caroline explained, as he and Lucy partnered together. “Latin men do not bother with stiff upper lips. If they are angry, it’s like an earthquake. If they are sad, it’s a flood. If they are passionate, the world itself is afire. Politeness and manners be damned.”

It may be a Latin dance, but Buck was not about to forget his manners with the younger girl in his hold. He didn’t much look at her; he couldn’t without feeling regret. It was better this way, he supposed, that he and Lucy never romanced before he was shipped off with his family to a strange city. The sometimes brush of her leg on his own as they learned still caused him to ache. 

Finally, he could take it no longer, and paused their dance while the music played on. He let go of Lucy, lowering and dropping her hand with infinite care. “Caroline, it’s late, and the figures are becoming fuzzy. Perhaps we could do this again some other time?”

“Sure, Valentino.” While she agreed, her eyes narrowed and glanced to her sister. “Tomorrow, after school.”

* * *

The day before Christmas Eve brought George Barnes home. Though he was still getting used to his cane, and his healing eyes still needed to be tended, he seemed in good cheer just to be out of the hospital ward. Becca seemed to take special responsibility in guiding her father in unfamiliar places.

Their house emptied of nearly all their possessions, the Barnes spent the last few days together as the Gardners’ guests. Buck had been misplaced out of the extra bedroom in favor of his parents, but he was given a cot to sleep on in the library, and he spent late hours trying to learn at least the basics of New York City geography from atlases and descriptions.

Both families attended the Christmas Eve pageant together. Pearl was one of the angels of course, and Becca played the back end of one of the magi’s camels. Her hamming it up was one of the few times Bucky remembered laughing those days. “Scene stealer!” he muttered to his father as he described her antics.

So many folks, having not seen his father since his accident, came up to the sergeant and his family to greet them with polite small talk. Few mentioned the tragedy directly, as if the Barnes misfortune would rub off on them. Still, his father stoically shook hands with them all as they wished his family a safe journey to New York. 

Virginia stayed home with the two youngest while the rest of them had a late-night snack before attending the midnight service at their church. This was the first Christmas Lucy was deemed old enough to attend, which had her excited in her own quiet way. 

Just minutes before they were leaving, Buck went to the library to find his tie. The two fathers were seated there, a bottle of spirits plainly set out between them. 

“Sirs,” he said, to announce himself.

“Why don’t you enjoy some Christmas cheer with us, son?” his father asked, holding out his own half-finished glass. The bourbon wasn’t as smooth as the cognac he had before, but Buck liked it anyway.

The glow of the booze made the service all the more magical. Buck’s favorite part was always at the end, when all the electric lights were cut and the congregation all took up white tapered candles, lighting them one to another while everyone sang _'Silent Night'._ His mother dipped her candle to spark her son’s, her other hand pressed slightly to her swelling stomach. Then he, telling his hand not to shake, turned and lit Lucy’s candle. She smiled widely at the spectacle, openly and delightedly, and Buck smiled back, joining his voice again with renewed enthusiasm.

When the house went to bed, Buck stared at the darkened library ceiling. His last thoughts before sleep were not of the dearth of gifts he expected the next morning, but of Lucy’s warm brown eyes, dancing with the light of dozens of tiny flames.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really do promise the narrative will get to Brooklyn soon. Spending 20,000+ words on the "Part 1" has made me a bit sad to leave the open skies and the Gardner family behind. It won't be without some payoff, dear readers.


	21. Chapter 21

The days of extravagant Christmas presents for the children had fled in the wake of uncertain financial futures, replaced by necessities like new winter footwear and underclothes. Still, under the garlanded tree that year was a few special things for everyone. The lieutenant gave George Barnes a dozen cigars to light up upon the birth of Bucky’s sibling. His mother received a number of maternity clothes and a fashionable new hat.

Buck himself got a shaving kit with a safety razor and a boars-hair brush; he rubbed his chin, not yet feeling any hairs, but knew he would have to start the daily ritual of all well-groomed men soon enough. He had seen his father on his hospital bed roughened with dark whiskers in those early weeks, but as he recovered either the nurses shaved him or perhaps his mother did. Blind, was his father capable of shaving himself? He swallowed and knew better than ask in company.

To the Gardner girls, his family gave a few board games, including Hop Ching Checkers, which could be played by all the children at once, including Caroline if she wished, and there was an immediate plan to play it as soon as all the presents were unwrapped.

A box, heavily decorated, came from Baltimore just a day or two before via express service, and it seemed it was the Gardner tradition that all three girls gather round it to open it. Buck guessed it was from Virginia’s mother back east.

Buck watched with curiosity as they carefully untied the thick ribbon and took off the lid. There seemed to be something delicate and almost floral in it. A decoration? Few things but pine grew around the hills in the arid climate of their Oklahoma town, and it seemed that the girls were enamored of the odd gift, but their hushed and praising tones. Caroline whispered something to Lucy and the younger's ears pinkened.

“Well, girls?” the Lieutenant prompted. “What did Mumsy Townsend send this year?”

“Mistletoe,” Caroline replied, holding up the box with the perfectly arranged sprigs of green stems and milk-white berries on a golden ribbon. There was a printed card arranged with it, and Caroline passed it to her younger sister while finally handing over the box to Pearl for closer study.

With her brow furrowed seriously, Lucy intoned: _”One custom concerning the mistletoe comes to us from Norse mythology. Balder, the son of Odin and Frigga, was born of light, innocence, gentleness, and beauty. Such did Frigga cherish him that she went to all the realms and demanded oaths of every element, force of nature, and part of creation that they not harm her son, and so enamored they of Balder that they swore without hesitation. However, by the cunning of the malevolent god Loki, Frigga overlooked the mistletoe, convinced by the great deceiver that it was too small and humble a plant to ever harm her son._

_“As Balder grew to a young man, it became a game amongst the host of Asgard to throw spears and shoot arrows at him, each harmlessly deflected. Loki then went to the blind and homely smith Hoder, who was often forgotten in the festivities and eager to join in the merriment. Loki offered him a simple dart tipped with a point of mistletoe. So unwittingly, Hoder slew Balder. In her grief and remembrance for her son, the sorceress Frigga wove magics and proclaimed the mistletoe would forever be a symbol of love, and that no one beneath it could ever come to harm but instead would receive a token of affection: the kiss.”_

Buck knew of the old Classical and Greek gods from his informal education. In fact, it had been one of the first things Caroline insisted he learn, as so much literature and so much poetry stood on the shoulders of those ancient myths. But he was unfamiliar with any of the Nordic pantheons. Still, it was easy to imagine this Frigga and Loki with as many mortal flaws as humanity. But Balder? No boy or man could be so perfect.

“Where do we put it up?” Pearl asked, looking up and around to the ceiling.

“Where it should _always_ go, Pearl,” Caroline answered, a bit dramatically exasperated.

“And it waits to _after_ the dinner, my girls. As tradition,” William Gardner emphasized. Bucky watched Caroline roll her eyes. 

“A tradition we haven’t enjoyed since we’ve moved,” the girl of seventeen remarked.

“Then up until New Year’s right?” Lucy asked.

“As tradition,” the lieutenant repeated.

Buck felt uncertain and a keen observation that many feminine eyes were on him since the box was opened. Only Becca seemed as in-the-dark as he, but she was able to simply return to admiring her new set of paper dolls she had received. His skin felt prickly, and he swallowed.

“Well, um...who wants to break out the checkers?” he asked, as a way of threading through the tension.

“Oh, yes!” Pearl exclaimed and set down the box from Baltimore to hurry to the parlor’s small octagonal table. Buck played the novel game with its freshly printed cardboard and shining glass marbles with Pearl, Becca, and Lucy. Their mothers went to the kitchen to put the finishing touches on their Christmas meal. William Gardner lead his father back to the library, likely to have a cigarette and perhaps a quiet drink, as they had the night before. Caroline simply continued rotating the holiday-themed music out while working on a new book of crossword puzzles.

The dinner itself was bittersweet. Two families as one today, but on the morrow divided. William Gardner offered a toast with spiced cider before they started.

“Before our nation joined in the Great War, ordinary British and German soldiers were moved by the spirit of Christmas and set down their arms. They sang to one another instead of fighting. Some even came out of the trenches and met each other in that no-mans’ land. In those hours, the Lord’s peace trumped the commands of mortal rulers.” He tipped his glass to his fellow serviceman. “George, my friend, you served in that War; then after the armistice, you continued to prepare our great country for any future threats. Now, I think the Lord offers you your own ceasefire, for you have earned it along with the greatest heroes of our time. May He and the heavenly host bless you and your family as you make your way to your new home. God bless, and peace on earth."

Everyone at the table, even Caroline, seemed moved. Bucky himself felt the telltale tightening of his throat heralding the prick of tears. Thankfully, they were able to shortly klink their glasses together over a honeyed and cloved ham, and he could take deep, deep swallows before more emotion came to the fore.

At the meal, Buck witnessed his father have difficulty getting his food from his plate to his utensil to his mouth as easily and carelessly as he once could. Wordlessly, the man rather gave up and sat back, leaving half of the nourishment untouched before him. His mother said something soft and consoling to her husband, something about the City and good organizations, to which George nodded and felt for his wife’s hand on the table. 

Buck didn’t know what to do but pretend that nothing was amiss. There was only a shadowed pocket where his father’s left eye used to be, and a patch hid his right. At the hospital, Buck witnessed the clouded pupil and and the angry red of scarred and knitting flesh, and at first he couldn’t look for long at his father’s disfigurement. He remembered his father’s fastidiousness which may have actually been a certain form of masculine vanity. It was probably a blessing George Barnes could not see himself in a mirror. Still, Becca had cried when she first saw him. The family had come to terms with his new face, but still Buck caught people staring whenever they were in public, and that made him somehow vaguely mad.

Returning his mind from its grim wondering, Buck concentrated on polishing off his custard. As soon as the Lieutenant’s silver dessert spoon was finally, ritualistically set on his empty plate, there was a nearly simultaneous scraping of chairs from the Gardner girls as they got up, set their napkins on the seats, and raced out of the dining room to the parlor, whispering to one another. Buck, half-standing in an attempt at gentlemanly etiquette, found himself lifting his brow at their father.

William Gardner just shook his head. When he wiped his mouth, he smiled at the boy. “Why don’t you come to the library for a little liquid courage, my son? And always remember... in the game, you get to choose whether it be the hand, cheek, or lips.”

The game?

Troubled in more ways than one, Buck realized the mistletoe was a part of a _kissing game._

* * *

Cups of warmed cider were fortified in the men's private company, and Buck savored the bite of cinnamon mingled with the brandy. His father decided that his son should be introduced to poker, which had Buck nervous for how to include his Pop, who would never see spade from heart again.

“Just whisper to me what’s in the hole and what’s face up the table, and I’ll keep them in my head, James. Go on,” George encouraged. “It will be just like me looking over your shoulder.”

“Now, m’boy,” the lieutenant advised as he dealt. “Don’t let your dad fool you into thinking that he’s harmless. He’s bragged to me of cleaning up cartons of Frenchie cigarettes and Limey scotch back on the continent.”

They played a number hands of seven card stud, and it would have worked better with more players at the table, but it was enough for Buck to get a handle on the game and pick up some advice from Pop on how many chips to bet each round. Buck sensed that his father had lesson upon lesson that could not be learned in a single night. The drinks and his father’s good spirits lulled him into nearly forgetting that there was the mistletoe and the uncertainty awaiting him.

After an hour or so, there was a knock on the door, and it was Mrs. Gardner. “I think the girls will burst if you men don’t come out and enjoy some of their company,” she chided, warmly.

The lieutenant laughed, tossed down the cards. As he rose, he patted Buck on the shoulder. “Time to face the music, lad!”

The boy took a deep breath. “Music, right.”

Buck had a slight buzz as he helped his father back down the long hall to the parlor, where all the women and girls were seated in the various chaises and couches, and a few more chairs had been brought in from the dining room. The electric lights had been turned off, and the room was bathed only in fire-, candle-, and lamp-light, golden and inviting. A waltz was playing.

From the crystal chandelier hung the bundle of mistletoe. A scarlet, velvet-covered top-hat, adorned with sprigs of holly in the band and along the brim, was seated upside-down on the wide, cherrywood mantle of the fireplace.

“Sit with your father, son,” the lieutenant instructed. “My eldest will explain how it goes.”

As Buck found he and his Pop a seat, Caroline rose from hers, and began to slowly circle the room, spiraling around the chandelier. He only watched her out of the corner of her eye, preferring instead to study Lucy. The girl sat upright on the edge of the couch with Becca. Her legs crossed and her hands rested on her knees. She cast her eyes somewhat downwards, demurely or studiously.

“This game came from our ancestors in the Old World, carried across the seas for Yuletime gatherings and parties. The men present take turns, youngest to oldest, drawing a ribbon with eyes closed out of the hat,” Caroline announced as she motioned towards the mantle. “Each lady in the room is matched to a different color of ribbon within the hat.” She then held up her own wrist, to which was encircled by a black velvet bow. “It is the gentleman who pulls the ribbon, but it is the lady who decides whether she’d like a kiss or a dance. Then it is up to the man who drew the ribbon to take her up or to pass the offer to another. If it is a kiss, it is to be done underneath the mistletoe.”

There was a gleam in Caroline’s eye that Buck knew well enough. This symbolic game was a sort of disguise for all the labyrinthine twists and turns of lust and love. He was pretty certain she knew that _he_ knew this was a test of sorts. What kind of man was he? How would he treat the women who were not the focus of his desire? How would he reward or curse his fellows? The game was a distillation of all sexual politics that came with adulthood; over hundreds of years, the game was still played by each generation in their own fashion, again and again.

Buck refused to be intimidated. He got to his feet and went to the mantle, slowly. “By the rules, it means I’m first, yes?”

He closed his eyes and dipped his hand into the satin-lined hat, trying to avoid the pricks of the ringed holly leaves as he snagged a ribbon. What he pulled out was a pale green color. Rebecca, his own sister. He was somewhat relieved and somewhat disappointed. He turned toward his sibling. “Kiss or dance, Sis?”

“Dance!” she replied, as he was pretty certain she would. Kisses at her age were familial and tender and something she got almost every day.

But rather than sweep her onto the floor himself, he passed her ribbon to William Gardner. “Sir, would you honor my sister with a waltz?”

The lieutenant smiled and soon took the girl’s hand, keeping his steps simple and small for her. When the song on the victrola ended, the man took the hat from the mantle and gave it to Becca to deliver. “It’s your father’s turn. His draw is next.”

George Barnes reached his hand out tentatively, and quickly felt the barbs before the silky lining and the tangle of ribbons within. When he extracted one, he held it out to the room. “Whose?”

“Mine,” Virginia Gardner answered. And then, without being prompted, she decided. “A kiss.” Buck watched his father gently curl the ribbon in his own fingers, unwilling to give it away to his friend or his son. The woman claimed him and guided him to the center of the room to stand under the waxy leaves and pale berries. 

Buck watched as Mrs. Gardner slowly slid one of her hands up his father’s suited forearm, and the other rested on the angle of his shoulder and neck. Buck had only his mother’s old assurances that his father had once been the best of wooers, because here and now George Barnes seemed rocked back on his heels and hesitant. Virginia then whispered something in his father’s ear, and the man smiled as he once had before his accident; the curve of his lips pressed first gently against one of her closed eyelids before sweeping to her temple. It was a way of kissing that the boy had never imagined before, and he found it both chaste and erotic at once.

Lieutenant Gardner was next. Heedless of scratches, he thrust his hand in and he found the match with Winifred’s ribbon. His mother seemed younger suddenly, even with her third child on its way. She declared with soft eyes, “A dance.” She proposed something that sounded like ‘Mah-sheesh’, and Buck tilted his head in curiosity.

“It would be my pleasure, Winifred,” the lieutenant responded, tucking the ribbon in the pocket of his vest. “Lucille, can you play us something like a polka? Add a little bit of an Argentine flair?”

Soon, Lucy's fingers offered their introductory bars on their piano. The performance in the parlor between his mother and the pilot was curious to Buck. He knew the polka, but he had never seen a couple advance so much on their heels and not their toes, and that at least half of the dance was executed with his mother’s back turned and pressed to William’s front. It was something older than he, an artifact; yet it was from a time not so long ago, when there was not yet the Charleston. He watched with fascination till its finale.

It was his turn next. Caroline, Lucy, and Pearl were all still in play. Buck wondered if the hat hadn’t been rigged somehow, like a dishonest game of poker. He snaked his hand in again and tugged out Caroline’s color.

He let his thumb trace over the velvet, and he found himself gazing down at his hand. His lips fell open, just a little, inviting. As his heart fluttered against his chest, in his lowest register he inquired, “Dance...or kiss?” It was only then -- then and ever-so-slowly as she taught him -- did he peel his eyes from the object, the tether in his grasp, to her. With the question asked, he focused on her mouth, and he did not blink.

He could see Caroline’s tongue swipe briefly against the inside of her cheek. Her eyes narrowed. “Kiss,” she challenged.

“Very well,” he responded. “Father. Here. She’s a firecracker for sure.”

Buck quickly touched his father’s knee with the ribbon; the man took it up. He may have been puzzled, but the disfigurement of his father’s face made him harder to judge.

The surprise and initial displeasure in Caroline’s eyes was quite clear to the boy. Her gaze darted back and forth from looking from handsome son to monster-like father. Buck had tricked her into thinking she still had strings on him, and she knew it. He felt himself raised an eyebrow, a self-assured smirk laying a counter-challenge. Did she have any true compassion?

The eldest Gardner girl’s chest rose and fell as she sighed, slowly and silently, without any of the cool haughtiness she often exhibited. Instead, there was a reservation, not unlike a person facing the guillotine. Caroline took up the sergeant’s hands and guided him to the center of the room. Squared off, she at least had the sense to slide her palm on his father’s jaw to guide him to her lips. Still, there was a tenseness to her. She was the princess tricked into kissing the toad, the beauty made to place her perfect lips on the ogre’s mottled visage.

Caroline’s face was inches from his father’s own when he grasped her knuckles and shook his head slightly. His father then took a step back from under the mistletoe, and he gallantly raised the feminine hand he had captured to his still-intact lips. The girl blinked, and she suddenly didn't seem so mature after-all, a natural rouge coloring her face.

Before anyone in the room could think or voice their approval or condemnation on what had occurred, George Barnes called for the hat to be brought to him while he was still standing. It was Becca that again retrieved it.

The next-to-last ribbon was Lucy’s and she did not hesitate in heralding it. 

“James, this is yours I believe.” His father didn’t even bother with exacting the choice from the girl before extending it in his son’s direction.

Buck’s stomach did a flip as he grasped the salmon-colored band of silk. Dance or kiss? Kiss or dance?

“I’d think I’d like to dance,” Lucy decided. Her voice was quiet at first, and then grew bolder as she scanned the room. “How about some jazzy rag on the player? And everyone should join in. Not just Bucky and me. Lets just all cut some rug. It’s Christmas, after all.”

Pearl never minded that her ribbon remained in the hat as she danced and laughed and had kisses rained down on her from every person in the room as the foot-tapping, loud music repeated again and again on the victrola. In that shining moment, the formality was forgotten and spirits were joyfully lifted. To Buck, it was a glimpse of the Lord’s paradise that awaited. It was simply enough to be together here and now. Worry about the there and then when it came.

Buck spun three-sixty on one foot, and suddenly ended up face-to-face with Lucy. He looked up and saw the dewy, ivory berries there, just above them. The girl’s delicate hands clenched his lapels with surprising strength.

“You should have kissed me a long time ago, Bucky Barnes,” Lucy stated, matter-of-factly, before pulling him against her with a forcefulness he didn’t think possible in her young and bird-like frame.

The meeting of their mouths wasn’t like it was in the movies, glamourous and staged. He was surprised more than anything, and initially they bumped teeth. His hands found the swan-like curve of her neck. Once his fingers splayed under her ears, and his thumbs felt the fine bones of Lucy’s cheeks, he found his equilibrium again. She was sun-warm nectar and the silken delicacy of a flower petal. 

All his tongue craved to do was dart between her lips.

It was only his better nature that made him stop. He was going away; she was staying here. He was on the cusp of manhood, and it was up to him to be responsible and as grown-up as possible. It may be fine for him to dwell on her and wrap himself in heartsickness for a time, but he need not encourage her to hurt the same way. Not to this girl of his admiration.

So before the kiss deepened, Buck eased himself away from Lucy. He then made himself smile at her. The people around them seemed like ghosts, the music still. He held her shoulders for just a bit, trying to memorize her then since he would have no photograph to take with him.

“That was a nice farewell, Lu. I’ll remember it all the way to New York City, and when...well...a lot.” He wanted to say, _I wish I could stay and be with you,_ and every thought that followed on the heels of that one; he knew that none of it would be of any use.

The girl’s face was flushed, and she smiled back. Her eyes unreadable. “I’ll remember you too.”

* * *

The last thing Buck did before he left for Oklahoma City and the train station was to leave one last gift. He hid it in the Gardners’ library, behind the velvet curtain next to the stained-glass lamp. In the oblong box he had penned a note.

_Dear Lucy,_

_I know this is a bit of a unconventional gift, but I hope you’ll like it anyway. Women are doing all sorts of novel things these days. I mean, look at Amelia Earhart. She wanted to fly, and no one was going to stop her from crossing the Atlantic. So if you are of ever a mind to go down to the creek and give it a go at some old bean tins, then you have this and you don’t have to let anyone stop you or tell you what girls can and can’t do. You can even paint the names of people that you’ve got a bone to pick with on the cans and have at it. (Trust me, I have, and it makes me feel better.)_

_I’ve paid Harry Matthews fifty cents in advance to give you a lesson on how to shoot. I hope you take him up, otherwise I’ve squandered some money I’ve been saving for a bicycle. Harry’s been a good friend and he’s kind. His family takes in strays and nurses baby birds that fell out of their nests until they can fly. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Try not to mind if he has two left feet._

_I’ll write when we get to Brooklyn to let you and the family know we’ve arrived. Maybe I’ll even send you a postcard from the Statue of Liberty._

_Keep taking care of Pearl; I think you two are more alike than you think. And never forget, Lucille Eleanor Gardner: the light that shines the brightest is not always the one that shines the fairest._

_Yours,_

_Bucky_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I guess I have this love of writing Christmas scenes in my fics. The kissing game (with the top-hat and mistletoe) I wrote here has no historical record, but it seemed like a fun, plausible Old World way to jack up the emotional tension between Buck, Caroline, and Lucy. [Maybe it's also a subconscious nod to Sebastian Stan as the Mad Hatter in 'Once Upon a Time'.] Also, a little nudge-nudge, wink-wink to Loki and Thor before they show up decades upon decades later in the MCU.
> 
> Farewell to the west and, in the next chapter, hello to the Big Apple!


	22. Chapter 22

Buck stood on the landing of this aunt’s and uncle’s Brooklyn townhouse, his suitcase handle clutched in his hand. The three-day journey by train from Oklahoma City took the Barnes family first to Chicago. They traveled north for the first leg, and with that direction came snows, sparking in the moonlight or simply glaring in the sun. Becca had plastered her nose against the window for most of the trip, utterly taken with the changing country-side and passing cityscapes. She especially delighted in describing it to their father, who smiled briefly through his blind, gloomy visage.

Bucky just buried himself in Caroline’s last gift: Ernest Hemingway’s _Farewell to Arms,_ published just that year. It wasn’t a book a son of a soldier should be reading, he sensed, but Buck didn’t particularly care about much of anything at the moment. The mile after mile of shining steel track took him further away from where he wanted to be the most; it distanced him somehow from _who_ he thought he would be, too. He was just a husk now. Like those acres after acres of pale cornstalks, left stripped and half-broken in the dry, winter wind.

The family’s exodus from their previous life reached conclusion in an underground terminal on the island of Manhattan, when Aunt Janet Reynolds and her husband, Mr. Lawrence Reynolds, met them upon their disembarking from the rail-car. Buck’s mother greeted her older sister, who seemed so caught up in Winifred’s advancing pregnancy that she hardly had a word of hello for her nephew.

As they caravanned in two vehicles from Manhattan to their new home, Buck was aware of how _noisy_ the city was with motors, and horns, and crowded people all droning at one another. The streets and sidewalks were lined with small mounds of dirty blackened ice that he guessed once was snow. His nose was assaulted too by exhaust and stenches he could not name. He shrunk back down into his seat, wrapping his arms around one another, waiting for when he and his family would finally be disgorged. He’d rather look at the back of Uncle Reynold’s head then at the never-ending jumble of concrete and iron.

Now as he studied the three-storeyed structure in front of him, he felt his feet glued in place, like his limbs were buried up to the ankles in quick-setting cement. He wistfully held onto a childish hope, that it could all be taken back and the events of the last three months undone, if only he held his ground and didn’t step over that threshold. 

“C’mon, Bucky! After we put our things in our rooms, we can _explore_!” It was his sister that was the brave one now. She tugged at his left hand, her pale green eyes turning from excitement to concern. “Bucky?”

He didn’t know how long he stood there, a fist clenching the boxed necessities that was his life without a home. He just thought himself a frozen, stone-like pillar or perhaps a statue like the lions in front of the New York City Public Library.

“Alright, Sis,” he acquiesced. He took a small step forward, and another, until the townhouse swallowed him and made him just another boy from Brooklyn.

* * *

The multi-storeyed townhouse that was the Barnes’ new home was typical for the neighborhood, structure-to-structure, cheek to jowl, with fellow residents to the right and residents to the left. The only yard the place had was what was termed a garden, a small spit of dirt in the back of the residence just large enough for a few vegetable and flower beds and a patio. Certainly not enough room to toss a baseball around.

The brownstone, as this type of City house was called, was purchased by Buck’s Buchanan grandfather sometime just before the turn of the century. At his death (he had been a widower for several years), it was willed to the eldest of the Buchanan girls, Aunt Janet.

The spectre of death seemed just as much of a part of the house as the floorboards. The Reynolds had lost their two young sons in the influenza pandemic of late 1918, and they never had more. Photographs of the boys still hung on the walls along with others of the Buchanan clan. Buck seemed to share the shape of his nose and forehead with them but little else. He calculated their birth-year to his own and realized, had Charles and Daniel lived, they would be two and four years older than him.

His mother made a special occasion of tucking her kids into their new beds that night, even though Buck’s twelfth birthday had been the unspoken end of such a ritual in Oklahoma. Winifred sang to Becca in their first lamp-lit yet starless city night before she planned at last to visit her son. Secretly, Buck pressed his ears against the adjoining wall of their rooms, closing his eyes and soaking up the lullaby that his child-self hungered for but his adult-self could not admit.

Something was eating at Buck ever since those first few days of his father’s hospitalization. And here, one-to-one, tucked in a strange bed with strange sheets that smelled of a strange soap, he was reminded of it again.

His mother’s familiar footsteps made unfamiliar creaks on the floorboards close to his room. Buck tucked his book away when his mother entered. She pulled up a chair from the spartan desk just to the right of his bed. Unsure of what to say, of how to ask something so uncomfortable, he just let her begin.

“Aunt Janet has been in touch with the Brooklyn schools,” she said. “The Christmas break ends on the fifth, and we can enroll you and your sister as soon as the paperwork is done. Your class will be big, but that’s more friends for you to make.”

The boy didn’t want any friends at the moment, and his face must have shown it. His mother offered him a soft, consoling gaze. “It’s not bad here, James. Just different. You’ll sit in classes with children whose parents and grandparents came from so many places around the world.”

He wanted to snap, _’If it’s so great, why did you ever leave it?’_ but no matter how much there was an ache in his heart for the wide sky and empty miles of land and a girl’s honey-brown eyes, he could not sustain ire against the woman that bore him. So instead, he inquired: “Different. Like negroes? And Jews?”

Winifred nodded, half smiling. “Them and more.”

Buck tossed himself back upon his pillow, briefly biting his lip. If he didn’t ask now, he’d probably not have another chance. It seemed easier to look at the ceiling than at his mother’s face.

“Mom. Where are Pop’s relatives? Why don’t we ever get letters or packages or wires from them? Why didn’t they ever offer us help?” There, it was asked. He pulled his covers up a little further, and then turned his head to look again at her.

She shifted in her seat, breaking her gaze from her son for a long moment. Then she reached down and stroked back her son’s hair. “Your father doesn’t get along with his family. He left as soon as he could work. Your Pop made it on his own when he wasn’t much older than you.”

Buck frowned, reminded of everything he read about boys and their adventures. “He ran away?”

“Yes, in a manner,” his mother answered, albeit somewhat reluctantly. Then something shifted in her. She stood, and cut an end to the conversation by bending and kissing his forehead. “Your father is doing his best. Your aunt and uncle are doing their best. We are _all_ doing our best, James, to try to have a decent life. To try to support one-another, even to try to love one-another. Please remember that, when it gets hard. Just do your best.”

“Okay,” he breathed a child’s easy obedience, although a defiant part of him was not so convinced. God did not intervened in so many wretches’ fates, so many warriors’ lives. _He_ didn't do his best. Why should the boy do what an omnipotent being, his supposed creator, could not?

The journey to Brooklyn taxed him, and Buck was exhausted in a way that simple physical exertion did not match. His last musing before his sleep was that he was probably resting in the room and the bed that either Daniel or Charles had occupied before influenza took them.

Buck kept the company of phantoms. To Lucy, he was just another figment of her past. Just like his cousins were to his aunt and uncle. Just like his father, slipping away one night without warning from the roof where he had sheltered as a child. They were all ghosts, of one kind or another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My desire to get some writing out and foretell the next act (pretty much Act 2 of a 5 Act story), trumped creating a longer chapter. Buck's in Brooklyn. It's winter. He hates it. But after winter comes Spring. And baseball season. And Steve. Their meeting _will_ happen, I swear. Thanks to my readers for their patience.


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now with %100 more Steve Rogers! Thank you to all my readers that have been patiently awaiting the meeting between Buck and Steve. It has been such a labor of love.

Bucky had no particular admiration for his uncle. Uncle Lawrence was a squat and somewhat-portly man who worked as an accountant for Domino Sugar, and he came home in the evenings smelling like burnt caramel. The man was friendly, in a quiet way, but he had no _presence_ to him, no confidence that Buck realized he had taken for granted in military men like his father and Lieutenant Gardner, or innovators like Mr. Wiley Post. His lone advice to his nephew and niece, upon entering their new school was not to ‘rock the boat.’ It seemed to the boy his Uncle had never taken a single risk in his life, and thus was both harmless and completely uninteresting to Buck.

It was his Aunt Janet that truly ran the roost in the household. In a dozen subtle ways, she indicated the whole of her sister’s family was simply a charity case. And there were certain agreements made for the opportunity to live under the Reynolds’ roof and sup at their table. The entire family was expected to go to the Sunday mass, the eldest Buchanan being sister being a devout Catholic; with that came Winifred’s promise that her next child would be baptised and raise in that faith.

Buck and Becca went to separate schools. While their mother walked her every weekday along the few blocks to her elementary, Buck went alone to his. He had a good innate sense of direction, and that is what got him through the commotion of the streets that first week. Men and women spoke in a half-dozen languages he did not understand, and even those that spoke English did so at a cadences that the boy was almost dizzied by.

Buck’s own accent, sweetened and slowed by years in Oklahoma, proved the beginning of his troubles with his new classmates. He was well aware of the muffled giggles when he answered his teachers, and he caught whispers of ‘rube’ and ‘hayseed’ from knots of his peers during lunch and recess breaks. He learned it may be best to keep his mouth closed and not to speak unless being spoken to. No one confronted him directly; it was if as they could sense the dark waters beyond the dam of his closed lips and his sometimes-clenched hands, ready to burst upon on the first thing that soundly provoked him.

After dinner that week, he pleaded with his father to let him quit school and start looking for work.

“Absolutely not, James,” George answered, straightening in his chair next to the office’s radio, where he spent much of his time listening the numerous stations.

“But, Pop. The pension can’t be enough, not with a new little sister or brother on the way,” Buck pointed out. “I could be a good Western Union messenger, and those boys get classes too, run by the company.”

“No argument. You need to finish public school. Get your diploma. That’s an order,” his father said as he had time and time again. Only George Barnes wasn’t a Staff Sergeant anymore, not with his honorable discharge.

Bucky frowned. “Do you really think I’m destined for West Point? Do you really think that a stupid piece of paper is going to matter? I can do something for our family _now_.”

The boy watched his father tighten his jaw and swallow. The man then pointed out, “There is a public institution called the Boys High School in this borough. It has a baseball team and a rifle team and other athletic programs, some of which are the only ones of its kind in the city. But it only takes the best students with the best academic records and achievements.”

Buck sighed. His father had an uncanny knack of incentivizing his son.

George continued, lacing his fingers over one another on his lap. “I know you’re lookin’ for trouble, my boy, and there is plenty of trouble to be had here. But what choices you make this next year will shape you for the next ten. What makes a man is not how many times he falls, but how many times he finds it within himself to stand back up and push ahead.” His single clouded, disfigured eye blinked. “There are ways to soldier even without a war. You’re inventive, my son. I know, if you applied yourself, you can figure out most any problem.”

The dark-haired boy wanted to continue to argue, but he had witnessed first-hand how his sire coped with his blindness. It could have been too easy for the ex-sergeant to fall into a haze of medicines designed to promote sleep and reduce his pain (and there were many elixirs hawked in every corner pharmacy, being a legally obtainable source of liquor). The greying-haired man rejected that, and he and Winifred sought out the charities for the blind that peppered New York City to aid him.

“I understand,” Buck replied, gravely. “Well...what about a part-time job?” If he was going to become an adult, he figured he wouldn’t always defer without some challenge, not even to his parents. It wasn’t simply taking blind orders anymore.

“If your quarterly grades in March are as good or better as they were back in Lawton, then I don’t see any reason for you not to take an evening or weekend job. Provided you can find one, which is looking less-and-less. But, who knows in this town? You may get lucky.” George then leaned forward in his chair, his shoulders squared towards Bucky. “Do we have an agreement, James?”

A short, thin-lipped smile floated over the lips his father would would never witness. The boy had a flicker of hope. “Sure, Pop. It’s a deal.”

* * *

The first thing that Buck could think of to make his new situation better was to get to know the streets of his new neighborhood. After school he would drop off his stack of textbooks, have a small snack, and then bundle himself again against the cold for his exploration. There was a strange paradox to city living that Buck realized: even with so many people on the sidewalks and crowded into buildings, one could be utterly anonymous and terrifying alone.

Many men, with a haggard look in their faces, loitered on the sidewalks, talking to each other of how their jobs had been cut, dominoes falling on one another since the Crash.

“The bubbles had to come off the champagne sometime…”

“Did you hear about the man who got a hotel room on the ninth floor and the clerk asked whether he wanted it for sleeping or for jumping?”

“No! But I heard about the two men who jumped hand-in-hand because they held a joint account!”

At first Buck just lifted his collar, adjusted his scarf, and dug his hands deeper in his coat pockets, walking on silently. Then one afternoon it occurred to him that if he was going to eliminate his drawl, he needed to practice speaking like the men on the street did. So as he caught snippets of conversation, when he was just out of earshot, he repeated the words to himself, mimicking them. He did it with the radio shows, too, and it became a game that he and Becca did together over the homework they were each given to catch up to their new curriculums.

The comedy skits were the best to imitate, and with one occasion, Buck found himself and his sister laughing so hard that they fell on the floor and clutched their guts. Aunt Janet burst in on them, her ever-dour face fallen into an even deeper hard scowl. She stalked across the room, turning off the program.

“What is _wrong_ with you little heathens?” the woman snapped. “You’re supposed to be doing your school work! Not fooling about like two simpletons!”

Buck was the one that spoke up, not caring to pick himself up from the carpet. “You’re right, Aunt. Rebecca and I are just idiots.” He sighed and shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t get up and he didn’t take his gaze off of her. In his admission, he halted himself from apologizing or regretting finally having a glimmer of something warm and good again.

“Don’t make me talk to your father!” she huffed, eyes narrowing.

“Go ahead,” Buck challenged. “Tell him that we may be blowing off our academics. And tell him that it was the first time you heard his son laugh since his family came to Brooklyn. See what he says.”

“Nothing but trouble!” was the only thing Aunt Janet cut back before slamming the door.

Becca stuck her tongue out at the woman’s back, which had Buck chuckling once again.

Then he sighed and turned his head to gaze at his younger sister, who stared at him from across the floor. “I’m sorry she’s such a pill, Sis.”

“Are you better now, Bucky?” Becca asked, her fingertips oddly raking the pile of the rug below. “You were so sad, even since Pop’s accident.”

“I’ll be alright. Don’t ever write off a Barnes,” he assured her. “We’re like cats, you know? Father’s only used up four of his lives between the War and now...and you and I? We’ve got all nine.”

“You’re full of it,” Becca pronounced, peeling herself up.

“I’m a city boy, now. Everyone works an angle,” he responded, tucking in his legs briefly to rock on his back once and then use the momentum to propel himself on his feet. Real exercise, beyond his reconnaissance walks, had been absent from him. He needed to look into that bicycle. “Speaking of angles...I have geometry to finish. You?”

“Local history and geography,” his sister responded. “Kids in my class don’t know between Colorado and Iowa, yet. They call them all ‘square states.’ And they call me ‘Prairie Squaw.’”

Buck felt his jaw clench as he sat down at the table. “You want me to beat them up for you?”

His sister gave a long suffering sigh then, and he was taken-aback at just how wise she was. Too wise for her age. “Oh, Bucky. No. It’ll go away. I already have a few friends.”

“I don’t have any,” he admitted. “It’s not as easy to make friends, when you’re older.”

And then his sister gave him a _look_ , incredulous. “Then try harder.”

Unsettled and trying to even the score, he reached over their pencils and exercises and slid his long fingers through his sister’s pale-red locks, mussing her hair playfully. “You’re growing up to be a smarty-pants brat, you know?”

Becca ducked out of her sibling’s reach. “And you’re just a jerk!” she countered.

“Don’t make me talk to your father!” Buck trilled in the voice of his aunt.

His sister repeated the popping out of her pink tongue. She then quickly threw a wadded piece of paper at him, and when he lashed at her with a growl and curled, claw-like hands, Becca shifted to another role.

As she hid behind her wooden chair, Becca wailed dramatically, but with her best city dialect, she breathed. “What big eyes you have!”

“The better to see you with, my dear!” Buck boomed dramatically, slowly stomping towards her.

Becca then retreated to behind a modest curtain, continuing. “What big _teeth_ you have!”

The boy couldn’t help but smile behind his snarl. “The better to eat you with…!” And he lunged playfully at his little sister, crooking his arms sinisterly, purposefully missing her. He stomped and tromped dramatically a little longer (mostly to bother their aunt below). The girl evaded her brother up to the point that he went down on his knees acting like a four-legged beast. Then she was upon his back, falling upon him like a predator. He bucked her like a bronco until she shrieked and rolled onto the floor again.

Finally, their youthful energy spent, both siblings tired of the game.

“What do you want, Sis?” Buck asked, sitting back on his heels. “A new sister or a new brother?”

She twisted her mouth. “I don’t know. I think you should have a brother. All the Gardners back west....I think we need a brother.”

“I wished for one last birthday, Becca,” he whispered softly. “Look what happened.”

His sister’s eyes flicked to the crucifix, with its tortured figure of devotion that hung in every room of this house, and she twisted her mouth. “You’re asking wrong,” she concluded.

“Becca…” he breathed. He didn’t want to see his sister become another slave to a God of ‘mysterious ways’. That God that took his father’s sight and his bright future.

“No, silly. Don’t ask Him. He’s too busy.” On her small feet she went back to her textbook, flipping a few pages. “Ask _Her._ ” She lifted it towards him.

In her battered book was a woodcut image of a statue, a draped woman on a pedestal, with her crown contrasted against the clouds. He recognized the image as the Statue of Liberty, folded majestically in her Roman garments. A torch in one hand and a book with the Latin date of July 4, 1776 in another.

The idea of taking five cents and riding the streetcars into Manhattan, then finding his way to the ferry that went hourly across the waters, intrigued him.

“Well, why don’t we make a day of it?” Bucky suggested. “A Saturday for the Barnes family. Like we used to do at the lake.”

His sister grinned at him. “Sounds deeee-vine!”

It was a warm February day when mother and father, sister and brother went to visit the island where the Lady looked out of the harbor to the east. George Barnes turned his face towards the strengthening sunlight, feeling it on his scarred cheeks. Even though the moving air over the water was cold as vessel escorted them and other sight-seers from the dock at Battery Park to the pier of Bedloe’s Island, the ex-sergeant seemed very much to enjoy being out in the open again.

Buck liked it, too. He got to see the Manhattan skyline from another vantage. The almost-complete Chrysler Building was a silvery beacon of progress in a world regressing.

Becca leaned over the railing of the boat, standing one rung up and on her tip-toes. Buck keep one hand clenched into the waistband of her coat, just to assure she wouldn’t tip overboard.

“Do you think there are mermaids down there?” she asked, with all the wonder of a child.

“Sure. But don’t expect them to save you if you end up head-over-heels in the drink, Sis.”

When the family disembarked, Buck took his mother’s arm while his sister lead their father. Now six-months pregnant, Winifred walked slower than she once did. The boy occasionally stole glances at her expanding abdomen in curiosity. Whatever baby came would be born in the greatest city in America. 

They toured the pedestal, where a bronze plaque held the poem of the famous lines beckoning the tired, and poor, and huddled masses.

“Do you want to try to read it with me, Becca?” he asked.

“Okay,” she nodded, furrowing her brow. Many of the words of the sonnet were strange to her.

_”A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name; Mother of Exiles…_

When they finished, his sister whispered conspiratorially in his ear. “I _know_ She hears prayers now.”

“Careful Aunt Janet doesn’t hear you, little heathen!” he teased back.

There was a queue to ascend to the crown and George Barnes said. “Why don’t you two go on up without us? You’re mother and I are of a mind for a stroll. Meet us at the pier at quarter past eleven.”

Buck checked his watch, and realized they had a whole hour. “Sure, Pop!”

Winifred kissed her daughter’s forehead and favored her son with a small smile, well-aware that he was now too old not to be embarrassed by such motherly affections in public.

As they stood in line his sister dug something out of her coat pocket. “I found this on the schoolyard. Look! 1917.” She held up the penny to him. “That’s the year you were born, right?” 

“A lucky find!” he agreed.

“Here,” she said. “It’s yours. You can leave it like an offering at the top, you know? Like lighting a candle to a saint.”

“Oh, Becca,” he sighed, feeling the edges of sadness and disillusionment creep up on him again. “Someone will just find it and take it again.”

“Please?” she asked. “We’ll be right inside Her head. Right between Her ears. She _has_ to hear you.”

Buck smiled despite himself. Goodness, she had such imagination. “Okay, Sis.”

Their young limbs and lungs propelled them up well to the small deck of Lady Liberty’s crown. The bright late-morning sunlight that came through the multiple narrow windows was glaring at first, but then their eyes adjusted. An attendant was there to answer questions and to monitor the tourists.

Buck lifted his sister up for a better view, and the two amazed at looking at the harbor and down below at the star-shaped battlement that was originally designed as a fort to protect the harbor. Becca was also casting her eyes around on the inside.

“There!” she whispered, excitedly. “You can fit it between the curved beam and her skin. Just do it, Buck. I’ll distract the guard.”

So the boy felt for the copper penny while Becca went up to the attendant and started asking questions in her precocious and cutest little-girl voice. The cent warmed in his hand as his eyes flicked to the eighth-of-an-inch gap where he would wedge it.

 _Lady,_ he formed his silent prayer. _I don’t know what to ask for anymore. From the Lord or the saints or anyone. But if you are the Mother of Exiles, then help my family make this strange city our own. Help me figure out how to become another Brooklyn boy._

And with a quick motion, he pushed the 1917 Lincoln-faced coin into its new home, coughing once to hide the noise of the small scrape it made. He got one last look at the seascape at such a height, the boats coming into the harbor.

“Rebecca?” he called, over his shoulder.

“Here!” she answered, her eyes dancing with spritely mischief as she thanked the attendant profusely with her girlish charm.

“Lets go down and see if we can’t get a postcard to send to the Gardners.”

“Sounds swell to me!” she exclaimed.

As they descended once again on the steep stairs, Becca asked seriously, “Did you do it?”

“You’re a regular trouble-maker and delinquent, Sis,” he chided and then gave her the true answer. “Yes, I did.”

“Then let Her do Her work,” she said sagely.

* * *

It was the beginning of March, a week or so before his thirteenth birthday that Buck came back to Manhattan. His grades were up, and that meant as soon as the quarterly reports came, his father would allow him an after-school job. So he scouted and searched for employment, which was drying up as so many competed for any honest jobs they could find.

The sun was just starting to cast long shadows of the buildings west of Midtown when Buck decided he had to be finding a subway stop and heading back to Brooklyn in time for the evening meal. Most of the businesses had signs like ‘Shea’ and ‘Brennan’ and ‘O’Neil’ and Buck figured he wandered into an Irish neighborhood.

Buck decided to try to cut through an alley next to a grocery and got stopped short by a youth just a bit taller than him, standing square-shouldered with his arms folded across his chest.

“Move along!” he barked, but Buck saw past him to another two kids dragging a struggling scrap of a blond-hair boy further into the alley. He couldn’t have been older than eight, the size he was.

Three on one. Horrible odds to a fight. No matter how much their skinny target thrashed, he could not free himself as his aggressors kicked his feet out from him and forced him towards a brick wall.

Buck found his feet planted firmly where they were. “What’s going on?” he demanded, feeling his pulse up, that familiar and not-wholly-unwelcome thrill of confrontation. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw curtains from the second-storey windows swept closed.

“Little _shit’s_ breakin’ the rules.” The guard spat. “Brooklyn trash don’t belong here. Move along, unless you want some trouble, too!”

A hundred half-formed thoughts came into Bucky’s mind that instant. Some were of warning, some were of violence. That dark, angry part of him hungered to be uncaged. But the conviction that stuck and took root was the one that named the sandy-haired boy from his part of the City his _brother._

The scowling kid that stood before Buck never saw the punch to his gut coming, and he instantly doubled over. The Barne’s boy then raced to the other attackers and grabbed one by the shoulders of his jacket, throwing him with such force into a stack of wooden produce crates that he ended up flailing, likely getting a round of splinters in the process.

The third boy, probably the leader, proved the most cool and difficult, and he ignored Buck just long enough to get a good stomp in on the blond’s foot, twisting him violently and tossing him to the unforgiving, packed ground. Buck vaguely heard the kid’s muffled cry of pain.

The element of surprise was lost. Now all Buck had was his wits and his body’s natural grace. He raised his hands, taking a defensive pose.

“You a mick-lover? That it?” his opponent spat. Buck just prayed that none of them had knives.

“Just looking for a fair fight,” was what he answered. Maybe the gang had a small bit of honor about them, though Buck doubted it, beating up on someone so much younger with hardly a muscle to him.

“I don’t think you’ll be getting one today, pretty boy.”

Buck heard the footsteps of the crony that he first laid out behind him. He knew he was in trouble, about to be ganged up on. He figured he’d at least go down swinging, maybe get in a good lick or three before he was broken.

That’s when a greenish-yellow sphere, just larger than a baseball, went flying past Buck’s shoulder and made a horrible sound, half a thud and half a squish just behind him. 

“ _Fuck!_ ” was the swear Buck then heard, but he didn't dare turn his back to the largest of the pack. The next missile caught the beefy boy facing him right on the back of the head. Bits of stinking, sulfurous refuse splattered on his assailant’s neck and shoulders.

Cabbages. The Irish boy had braced himself up against the alleyway wall and was throwing half-rotten cabbages.

Buck almost wanted to laugh, but instead, he used the second of confusion to give the leader a good wallop, right across the cheekbone. He then hurried to the cabbage-boy’s side, spinning to ready himself against all of their shared attackers as the one Buck had thrown into the crates righted and extracted himself at last.

Another well-aimed lob landed square in the first boy’s face, and he actually went to his knees, gagging. “Let’s just get out of here, Bruno! Fuckin’ mick’s ruined my best shirt.”

The leader narrowed his eyes and frowned, swiping at the slime on the back of his neck. He took several steps backwards. “Fine, but we better not catch you back here, Picasso! Stay on your side of the river! You’re not doing Old O’Malley any favors!”

The blond just wheezed heavily as the three brutes took again to the street; they cursed colorfully and complained on and on of the stench.

Buck didn’t take his eyes off of the alleyway entrance for a long while, not until he was certain they were well and clear. His heart-rate slowed and his breath came back to him soon-enough.

“That was pretty smart,” Buck admitted, trying not to let the stink bother him. He turned and fished for his handkerchief to offer it to the other boy. If it was ruined, it didn’t matter; it was a minor casualty in the name of victory. As Buck handed it to him, he saw a genuineness to the blond’s thin face. Even his eyes were a strikingly _earnest,_ clear blue.

“Bruno has been trying to shake down O’Malley for protection money for months,” he huffed, wiping away the cabbage juice. “Even trying to stop him from having a few new signs painted for the store.”

His voice seemed just a little-too deep to be that of a nine-year-old. The boy then tried taking a tentative step on his left foot, and he clenched back a hiss.

“What’s a matter?” Bucky asked, his brow furrowed in worry.

“Ankle...it’s twisted up bad, I think.” He tried placing a little weight upon it, grimaced again, and nodded. “Yep. Pretty sure.”

It was instantly clear Bucky would need to help him a little longer to get him home.

“That goon said you were from Brooklyn. Which part?”

“Vinegar Hill,” the other boy responded. Buck knew it as a jumble of tenements of the poor and laborers, blocks and blocks away from the trolley lines. “You?”

“Fort Greene,” he replied, knowing that the Reynold’s brownstone was a palace in comparison and had multiple stops neatly and conveniently offered. “And it’s not what you think.”

“All I’m thinkin’ right now is grabbing my brushes and figuring out how to pogo my way to the subway,” he offered, a wry smile on his lips. 

“I’ll get you there,” Buck offered. "We can go together." The other boy was just slightly too big for Buck to carry wholesale, but he could at least be a crutch.

The boy used his clean hand to brush back his golden hair. “Thanks for the hanky. Don’t suppose you want it back?”

The taller boy shook his head. “Nah, just toss it. Better use for it than waving it in surrender.”

Something in the other boy shifted then, as if he decided instantly that Buck could be more than a one-time ally.

"Steve Rogers," he introduced. When Steve then offered his right hand, Buck had no hesitation, even if it smelt faintly of sulphur. 

“Bucky Barnes,” he replied in return, aware of how thin the other boy’s fingers felt in his own.

A half-hour later, as the two boys sat side-by-side as their public transport made it's route across the Manhattan Bridge, they shared those basic facts of life that new friends did, open and honest and with all possibilities before them.

“So how old are you, really?” Buck asked, staring out the window at the view of the harbor to the south.

“Eleven. Born the morning of July fourth, nineteen eighteen,” Steve responded, with a sort of tone that spoke of a greater, larger story.

Buck felt his breath catch a little, and his eyes landed to that pale, sea-green statue as she kept vigil over the waters, still and serene while their street-car swayed and jolted over the metal expanse between the two boroughs.

 _Lady,_ Buck thought as his heart swelled. He imagined, had she been a real woman, of falling on his knees before her, weeping into her robes in the stew of emotions that every pilgrim must feel at the end of their long journey. _Don’t ever let me doubt you again._


	24. Chapter 24

The two boys eased their way down the stairs from the elevated subway stop, just a block or two away from Buck’s Brooklyn home. For all that his new friend was thin and stunted, Steve Rogers hardly uttered a word of complaint as he hobbled with his sprained ankle, one stick-like arm hooked over Buck’s neck and shoulder, the other still clutching his case of artist’s brushes. It must be painful, and yet the kid bore it with dignity.

It was dark now, and Buck knew he would be late for supper. He wondered if Aunt Janet would give him another tongue-lashing, even in front of a guest.

“Listen,” Buck started as he continued to offer his shoulder to the other boy. Hop by hop, they made it closer to the brownstone. “That artillery accident my father had? His face is...well, he’s pretty scarred, missing an eye, and blind in the other. You should just be prepared.”

“No problem,” Steve answered.

“And, um…about the fight?” The last thing that the boy needed was to frighten his pregnant mother with a story of nearly ending up beaten and bloody in an Hell’s Kitchen alley by thugs associated with organized crime.

“I won’t lie, Bucky,” the other boy asserted. “Never have.”

Buck frowned and sighed. As soon as it came out, he’d probably end up with some sort of curfew for months, or being banned from visiting the other boroughs altogether. His displeasure at the thought must have caused him to tense, telegraphing it to the younger boy.

“You can do the talking though,” Steve then offered. “It’s your home, after all. And I’m grateful for all the help.”

“Alright,” Buck agreed. Was there not one bit of the blond boy that wasn’t a saint? 

Buck paused them in front of the the stoop of the townhouse. “Here we are. I’ll take your brushes, so you can use the railing for the last bit.”

The last few feet were the hardest, and the dark-haired boy felt his stomach flip, uncertain how the drama was about to play out. 

As soon as the wooden door latched behind them, Bucky called out down the narrow hall to the dining room. “Mom? Pop? Aunt Janet? Uncle Lawrence? I...we have a guest.”

Rebecca was the first one to appear out of the dining room, walking as fast as she could because there was a ‘no running in the house’ rule of the Reynolds. “Bucky! Bucky, are you okay?!” Then she saw Steve, and her eyes widened. “Um, hello,” she offered.

Steve gave the girl a small, almost shy smile, but then he looked past the girl to the knot of adults that had crowded into the hall. Even his father had gotten up from his seat. Buck could see the barely-checked fury on his aunt’s face, and he started to form his words when Steve spoke up.

“Mrs. Reynolds,” the boy politely greeted. “I’m sorry to disturb your meal.”

“Everyone,” Buck announced, setting the case of brushes on the small table just inside. “This is Steve Rogers. We met in Manhattan; he sprained his ankle and needed some help getting back home to Brooklyn. I’m sorry I’m late, but I thought I should be a Good Samaritan.”

 _Please,_ Buck thought to himself. _Please let that be good enough._

“Shall I dial his folks then to pick him up?” Uncle Lawrence asked. “Certainly he shouldn’t be walking home in his condition.”

Buck knew enough about Steve’s neighborhood to know that people there didn’t have telephones, much less automobiles.

“Can we invite him to eat with us? We're having pot-roast,” Becca offered.

“If I may, Mr. Reynolds, use your washroom?” Steve asked politely. Buck wondered if he asked not only to get the remains of the scent of putrid cabbage from his skin, but to give the family a little privacy to discuss the matter.

“Well, certainly,” the man said. “It’s up the stairs. Second door to the right.”

Steve hobbled slowly to the next floor, and as soon as he was out of sight, Buck launched at them all, feeling a fierce conviction pulse through his veins.

“Listen to me, everyone! Please!” Buck cried, the words pouring over themselves. “He’s really hurt, and his mother is working at Lennox Hill Hospital this evening and he doesn’t _have_ any other family because his father died fighting in the War. It’s just her and him in some tiny flat in Vinegar Hill. So if you want to send him home with an empty stomach to an empty place, then really, what kind of people _are_ we?”

He then finally took a breath, and surveyed the room with a heavy frown. The place between his shoulders felt cabled tighter than what was used on the City suspension bridges.

It was George Barnes that spoke up, first. “You’re right, James. Let’s call a doctor over to have a look at him.” It was clear that Aunt Janet was about to protest; the man could not see it, but he could anticipate it. “And _I’ll_ pay for it. No son of a hero should be treated like he’s a flea-bitten stray. Not when we can help it.”

The veteran’s words hung in the air. Even Aunt Janet was humbled, and she began doling out responsibilities. “Winifred and I will see what we can serve on trays from the table. Lawrence, look up the doctor we used for the boys. Rebecca, you, your father and James will have to keep our guest company until the doctor arrives.”

“Yes, Aunt Janet!” Becca answered with a grin on her face. “I’ll turn on the lights in the parlor. The radio too. ”

Buck just finally gave a sigh of relief, proud that his family had opened their home to the first new friend he truly had since their move to Brooklyn.

* * *

It was Buck’s father that invited Steve to sit with them as soon as he descended down from the bathroom. “Son,” George said. “Let us wait in the parlor until the doctor comes and takes a look at your ankle. I’d like to learn more about your father’s service to this country, if you would share.”

Buck though he saw something a bit fearful sweep over the other boy’s narrow feature over the mention of a doctor, but then Steve said, “Certainly, Sir,” in a way that Buck knew would please the ex-sergeant.

So while the radio was tuned to something jazzy, the blond boy spoke more of Private Joseph Rogers. Becca insisted that she was going to play the nursemaid, bringing Steve a pillow on which to prop up his foot. She smiled again at the scrawny boy as she helped serve hastily-made sandwiches out of the supper’s roast beef; Steve just seemed a little flustered at the sudden interest Buck’s sister paid to him.

“The 107th Infantry took part in the breaking of the Hindenburg Line,” George recounted, the tone in his voice more serious than nostalgic. “End of September in ‘18. Is that when he fell?”

Steve was making a brave show of it, but he faltered. “Yes. He...he was exposed to mustard gas, and he--” 

“My boy,” Buck’s father interrupted. “You don’t need to go on. I _know_ how ugly it is, and I thank God everyday that I wake up in the morning that the Americans never carried it, and I didn’t ever have to pass on an order for its use. Your father gave his life so that others may be preserved; it’s an honor for any man.”

“I am very proud, Sir. Dad was able to dictate a short letter. He didn’t have any regrets for his service,” Steve pronounced, his blue eyes taking on a brief, glassy look. "They were able to bring him back over."

The elder of the boys did not see it as an honor. All Buck saw in his mind’s eye was of a yellow-haired soldier covered in oily and weeping blisters; his lungs filling with fluid, slowly drowning.

September 1918. Buck knew that American Expeditionary Forces hadn’t yet reached the war-front until late 1917. And Steven Grant Rogers was born only three or so months before his father’s death.

It came like more of a punch than a bright revelation to Buck that Private Joseph Rogers never got to lay eyes on his first and only son. And that boy was still _proud_ of the way his father died. Not angry. Not like Buck had been at his father's injury, wallowing in self-pity and resentment for almost half a year. George Barnes was alive, and Mr. Rogers was not. Buck never thought to appreciate the simple fact that he still had a father; and that man, crippled as he was, was as good as any to his son and to his wife and daughter.

Buck suddenly felt very, very small. Smaller than the slip of a kid on the couch with his ankle cradled on top of a footstool. He just stared at his empty plate while his father and Steve continued their conversation, witnessing a stone creep up from his heart into his throat and lodge there.

 _I’ll do better,_ he vowed. _I’ll be better._

It was the doctor’s call upon the doorbell that woke Buck from the spell of his own remorse. George Barnes got up and answered the door himself, knowing the layout of the house incredibly well by now.

Buck looked to Steve again and tried to offer him a brave smile. “This doctor helped my baby cousins…” he started, then realized what he was saying, swallowing it back. “I mean…”

“It’s alright, Bucky,” the boy answered. “I’ve seen plenty of them. My mom’s a nurse, right?”

Buck’s father and the doctor consulted quietly in the hallway for a little longer, and then George reappeared to the entrance of the parlor. “James, please help Steve up the stairs to your mother’s and mine bedroom. I’ll stay with him until the doctor is finished, and you can see to your lessons and help Rebecca with hers in the meantime. When we’re all wrapped up, we’ll see if Steven is up for dessert.”

By his tone, the man had his reasons for keeping the audience of the examination small, and Buck just responded with a “Sure thing, Pop.” The boy was getting used to the way Steve’s weight hung at his side, and the two made it up the flight easily enough.

Minutes later, neither Becca nor Buck really concentrated on their books or exercises, they both cast their eyes again and again past the half-closed office door towards their parent’s bedroom.

“How old is he?” Becca whispered.

“Eleven,” Buck replied.

“Well, he doesn’t look that old,” she observed.

“He was born on Independence Day, Sis,” he finally shared, giving her a little nudge with his foot.

“I told you! I told you! I told you!” Becca gloated, letting her voice rise a little in her excitement. “I told you She’d listen!”

“Hush! Don’t make Aunt Janet think you shouldn’t get your dessert!” Still, Buck couldn’t banish a crook of a smile on the corners of his lips. “You’re very smart, I know.”

“Are you going to be best friends? 'Cause you should be!”

“We’ll see,” Buck hesitated, still shaken at the revelation Steve could have so little and be so optimistic while, he, hale and sound and still very much the Barnes’ and Reynolds’ princeling, had only grown bitter and disillusioned. “He and I...we’re a lot different.”

“Bullshit,” the six-year old blurted, before she gasped and covered her own mouth. Her eyes widened.

Her brother sighed and shook his head. “Guess you’re pickin’ up more than pennies in that schoolyard of yours, Sis. If our Aunt and Uncle catch you like that, and Mom and Pop are at one of the charity houses, you _know_ you are going to get your mouth washed out with lye soap. Never mind them sticking you in one of those dark confession boxes.”

Finally, her slender fingers peeled one-by-one from her mouth seeing that Buck wasn’t in the mood to get in her in trouble for her sailor’s language.

“I think you’ll get along better then swell,” Becca finally breathed. “Like real brothers.”

Buck stole a glance down the hall and then twirled his pencil in his fingers absently. “Maybe.” He tapped his pencil on the addition exercises she was working on. “Finish your sums.”

It was another twenty minutes by the small clock on a bookshelf before George Barnes stepped out into the hallway, alone, and turned towards where his children were studying. He reached for the knob and shut the door behind him. “James, come out and let’s chat. Close the office door behind you.”

The boy swallowed at the strange request, and left his pencil and his books open. When the latch clicked, his father reached for his son’s shoulder, and after finding it, placed the other on the opposite as well. Buck knew his father was fully blind except for some ability to distinguish light from dark, but the man locked his attention to his son in a very grave and serious way, none-the-less.

“That boy is a miracle. A real-life miracle.” George opined. “He’s survived scarlet fever and rheumatic fever as a young boy. It’s given him many chronic cardiac issues and lung issues he’ll live with for the rest of his life.”

“Well?” Buck asked trying to understand what his father was arriving at. “What about his ankle?”

“Not broken, thankfully.” George answered. “He needs to rest it overnight, and use crutches and a brace till it’s better. Could be a month or more. The doc’s written him a note excusing him from the rest of the week at his school.”

“I guess...um…” There was something he felt he was missing. “Can Steve stay with us? For the night? He said we could leave a message at the hospital for his mother, let her know what’s happened and where he is.”

“Son,” his father said, and Buck could catch some strange emotion in the tones and modulations of his voice. It sounded like long-held grief and deep pride and edged conviction all wrapped up in one. “I am going to give you some advice, and I need you to really listen to it. Not an order. Advice. Man to man.”

Buck blinked. “Okay, Father. I’m listening.”

“That boy,” George stated. “If you want to be the truest of friends with him, the kind of friends that pull each other through hell, then you’ll _never_ tell him what he can’t do. You’ll never coddle him, or call him ‘Little Stevie,’ or stop him from doing something stupid or fun that regular, healthy boys do because you think he’s too weak or he’ll get hurt. He’s had enough of that for one lifetime.” 

The man gave a good, solid squeeze of his son’s shoulders. “You treat Steven like an _equal_ , like a young man capable of taking his own risks and owning his mistakes. When it feels right, you challenge him, and when something goes wrong, you get him to his feet. Always have his back and offer him support when he really needs it, but never use guilt or belittle him if he refuses; find other means to help him. Above all, _never make him feel small._ That’s how you’ll have a friend for life.”

The leaden disgrace Buck carried around all evening evaporated in his amazement of his father’s words. 

The ex-sergeant had been robbed of his sight, but he could see into the heart of that other son of a soldier and find the truth there. The truth that no one ever wanted to be seen as insignificant or wholly incapable. Especially not a boy on the cusp of his manhood.

“I’ll do my best, Pop,” Bucky vowed, glad that his father couldn’t see the tears clinging to his dark lashes. “I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's note:
> 
> I'm tired of seeing in fic-after-fic of a 'fanon' of Buck calling Steve Rogers "Stevie". I think that depiction is not doing their friendship/relationship justice. (Even though I respect every writer's creative vision.) So I go a little heavy on the idea that Buck, from the very START, treated Steve as his equal, even with all of Steve's physical and health challenges. And that's what made them best friends. Through the lense of George Barnes, who is a disabled vet, I think that the reader can understand my [hopefully fresh] approach.
> 
> Comments on this especially welcome.


	25. Chapter 25

There wasn’t a spare bedroom in the house, between the Barnes and the Reynolds, and so the family improvised accommodations by taking the cushions from the parlor couch and putting them on the floor of Bucky’s room, tucking sheets and tossing blankets upon them. The pillow that had propped Steve’s ankle up made its way upstairs to perform the same duty.

Steve refused to displace Buck from his own bed; rather than make a fuss about it, the dark haired boy took his father’s wisdom and simply offered to swap should Steve change his mind.

Bucky lent Steve a pair of his pajamas, which were too big by several sizes, but were clean and comfortable.

When the two settled in, Steve made note of the the books stacked near his bed. “These all for school?” 

Buck shook his head. “No. Gifts mostly. From friends back in Oklahoma. One girl, Caroline, wanted to be sure that I had an...um… _expanded_ education.”

“That was very good of her,” Steve opined.

A chuckle came out of the older boy’s throat. “In some ways, maybe. Yes. But in other ways I think she was simply bored. Her younger sister though...she was the kind one.” Rather than stew on his sadness about Lucy, he asked. “Would you like to borrow a few? Something to read while you mend?”

“That’d be swell,” Steve answered.

There was a trunk in the corner of the boy’s room that held the rest of the books he had taken with him from Oklahoma. Bucky pondered what to loan Steve, the boy with an artist’s eye.

“Have you heard of Walt Whitman?” Buck ventured, kneeling and flipping the latch.

“Yeah. He lived in Brooklyn on-and-off over the years,” the other boy recalled, shifting himself just slightly on his make-do bed. His ankle, though wrapped, was still swollen to about twice the size as his other. 

Buck’s eyebrows shot up of their own accord. “Really?!”

“Manhattan doesn’t get to have _all_ the fame and glory,” Steve just quipped.

“I mean to go to a Yankees game, when the season starts up,” Buck mentioned as he began digging through the volumes there in the chest. He ignored the small ache in his heart when he ran across his old Boy Scout manual. School first, work second, athletics a third if he could manage it. There was little need for woodscraft in the greatest metropolis of the Americas.

“That’s a long way to go, Buck,” the other boy advised. “Two fees just to ride that far north. When the season starts, come with me to a Robins game. Ebbets Field. It’s just a stroll down Washington Avenue from here.”

He turned his head towards Steve, leaving the books for a moment. “You have a good arm. I mean...with the cabbages.”

The blond shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I have good aim,” was what he conceded.

Bucky held his tongue from further observations. There was a fine line between encouragement and patronization. 

“Ah, here we are,” Buck found _Leaves of Grass_ , which he hadn’t thumbed through since his father’s accident. He also pulled out another novel. “And _Tom Swift,_ for when you’d like something...ah...less intense.”

He handed both books to his sitting friend before pulling back his bedcovers and sliding himself in. “I really wish I didn’t have to go to school, tomorrow.”

Steve stopped fingering through the pages of Whitman’s work, but didn’t immediately turn his head to Buck . “Well, if you want, just if you _want_ , I could talk to O’Malley and get Bruno's gang back. I’m sure they’d give you a few busted ribs and a shiner to boot if you asked nicely.” He deadpanned the delivery, but at the very last moment he gave a little cocky smirk.

Bucky laughed and shook his head. “You’ve got quite a mouth on you too, Rogers.”

“If you can’t out-gun ‘em, out-wit ‘em,” was the boy’s eager and earnest response.

Buck decided he really liked the reed of a kid and had no doubt that whatever weaknesses Steve’s body threw at him, his mind was sharp and working. Rogers was, in Caroline’s words, ‘not like the other boys.’

“I wish we didn’t go to separate schools,” Buck said as he settled in with another Hemingway book.

“Well, next year I am transferring. My mother made a petition, ‘cause there isn’t any art classes where I currently am, and the administrators looked at my portfolio and made allowances,” Steve explained. “We’ll be in the same school, I think.”

It was probably the best news Buck had heard since coming East. The joy was unfamiliar, and it took him aback.

There was a knock on the door of the bedroom, and his mother’s voice. “Lights out, fellas.”

“You need anything tonight, you can wake me up, alright?” Buck said as he reached for the pull that turned off the lamp near his bed.

From the floor, Steve confirmed. “Sure thing. Goodnight, Buck. You saved my bacon today, and I won’t forget it.”

“Don't worry, pal. I won't! Memory of an elephant, ya know?" The dark-haired boy then said into the companionable air, "Goodnight, Steve.”

As the last coherent thoughts of his strange and amazing day came into his head, Buck rehearsed his father’s advice once more about the sickly boy from Vinegar Hill, hoping to etch it on the inside of his skull for as long as their friendship lasted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short little chapter in time for the holidays.
> 
> And for the reader that wants a little Walt Whitman as follow-up, here you go! ["Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"](http://www.bartleby.com/142/86.html)


	26. Chapter 26

Sarah Rogers came for her son the next morning, shortly before Bucky had to leave for school. She wasn’t dressed as a nurse but rather in practical clothes, carrying a pair of crutches that Buck noticed had worn painting of white, blue, and red stars along the wooden arms. Steve had obviously used them before.

Much like he could with his own mother, Buck saw features of her in Steve and other parts of mysterious origin. The late Joseph Rogers must have contributed to the shape of his nose and forehead, and indeed the blond of his son’s hair, for the young widow sported a short sweep of a tawny butterscotch under her modest hat. Sarah Rogers was neither delicate nor fleshy, taller than either Buck’s mother or his aunt and practical strength of one that lifts and labors as part of her living. The most striking thing about her was that she seemed inordinately _clean_ , without trace of makeup, lengthy fingernails, or perfume. Her skin had a peachy glow to it, a bit of freckling left over from her youth.

Buck witnessed that as soon as she was reunited with Steve in the hallway of his family’s brownstone, she knelt down on one knee, examining the weakened limb in question. Finding the ankle well-tended, she grasped her boy’s upper arms, squeezing them gently. “Oh, thank goodness…”

Sarah was much like Winifred with her son, reining herself in from much more affections for the sake of his boyish dignity.

“Mrs. Rogers,” Buck greeted politely as the woman cast her eyes to where he stood.

“Mom,” Steve pointed his chin down the hallway at he took up his crutches. “This is Bucky Barnes. Buck got me back to Brooklyn in one piece.”

The scrap of a boy may be idealistic, but he certainly wasn’t _dumb._ Steve wasn’t about to come out to their parents of the real danger the two Brooklyn boys had been in from Bruno and his friends, at least, not unless they asked directly. 

Buck stepped forward and gave Sarah Rogers the same brief, dashing smile he often used on the girls back in Oklahoma, glancing first somewhat-bashfully down before fully lifting his lids to meet her gaze. “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, ma’am.”

There was just enough of a look in Mrs. Roger’s eyes that signaled to Bucky that she had a very good idea of what had actually occurred. 

“I am in your family’s debt,” Sarah stated as she went from looking to her son’s newly minted friend to George Barnes, who still stood at the door. She had a lilt to her voice, as if she had come to the City from another land.

Bucky’s father responded. “The government gives the widows and children of fallen soldiers pensions. But bureaucrats’ cannot understand all what it means to serve. My family does. Please come in for a cup of coffee before we drive you home? I am sorry that my wife and daughter are not here to meet you, but Winifred takes Rebecca to her school in the mornings.”

So George and Aunt Janet had pleasantries with Mrs. Rogers and her son in the parlor while Buck tugged on his overcoat and tucked his wool cap in the crook of his arm. He made sure his completed exercises were in his shoulderbag and his lunch was also there before he walked back down the hall. They all grew quiet when he came through the entryway. Steve was sitting on the couch next to his mother, having a glass of milk rather than coffee. 

“Hey, Steve,” Bucky asked. “Can I come visit after school? You can fill me in on the Robins’ lineup before the season starts.”

“Sure, Buck. See you this afternoon,” the other boy replied warmly. “Third floor, remember?”

The dark-haired boy nodded, trying not to think of the struggle the slight blond would have negotiating three storeys. “Got it.” Then he added, “See you later! I’ll be back for dinner, Pop; don’t worry!”

Buck visited Steve every day that week after school, climbing up the stairs that zig-zagged outside of the Rogers’ apartment proper. He always bought a newspaper with him although Steve was mostly caught up with daily events from the radio. The place was kept tidy by both mother and son, although it took the boy a little aback that the toilets were shared amongst all the tenants. Steve’s baths had to either be heated on the stove as was done in decades past, or he visited a bathhouse a few blocks away.

In the small common room that was both the kitchen and the dining area, Buck saw a photographic portrait, lovingly framed, of Steve’s fair-haired father. Joseph Rogers was dressed in his uniform, and even though he was probably in his early twenties, to Buck he still seemed a very young man.

“They came over together,” Steve had explained. “Just the two of them. They weren’t even married yet.”

“Well, _there’s_ a story!” Buck opined, but kept it to himself that he fancied it rather romantic. He had taken a gamble revealing to his new friend his love of the written word, and only the fact that Steve had an artist’s eye opened Buck up to sharing that so soon. The elder boy wasn’t about to talk about the dancing that he positively itched to return to.

Today was Friday, and at the simple table next to the coal stove, Bucky and Steve had another leisurely game of chess while listening to the radio and discussing baseball, world events, or whatever came to mind. Steve was better at the game then he was, knowing only rudimentary strategy, but the blond-haired boy coached him.

“This Wednesday’s your birthday, right?” Steve inquired, capturing one of Buck’s black bishops.

“Damn,” he cursed at the loss of one of his pieces, knowing it would have been better had it be sacrificed for better position. “Yes, though my family’s really not planning anything. I mean, with us just moved…” He shrugged, castling his king. “We’re having a cake after dinner. Would you like to join us? I mean, for dinner _and_ the cake.”

“That’d be grand,” Steve replied with a smile. “Tell the truth, I get sick of being cooped up.”

“So what do you do during the winters?” Bucky asked, curiously. “It’s not like you can find a big ol’ hill to sled on.”

The other boy’s slender fingers placed his knight so that it threatened his friend’s queen. “If I have some extra spending money, I go to the Met with my sketchpad and practice with the sculptures or the old masterpieces.”

“I’ve never been there, or to any museum, really,” Buck acknowledged. “The Gardners had a few books of artwork, but Caroline always insisted there was no comparison to actually be able to see the work from any angle or distance.” He moved the black queen out of danger, but made no headway in threatening Steve’s king. “Show me around sometime?” The game was over in all but name. Still, they both liked to play it to the very end; it seemed more sportsmanlike that way.

“Sure, Buck,” Steve said with some resignation. “We can do that. Check.”

“Oh. I mean only if you _want_ me to tag along. I didn’t mean…” Bucky moved a tired pawn in the way to postpone the inevitable. 

“I’ve just been going for a few years alone.” Steve shrugged. “Check mate.” 

Buck tipped over his king in defeat, and the wooden piece made a louder noise than he intended, rolling on its carved base across the checkered playing surface. “Really, Steve,” he stressed. “I don’t need to shadow you. It was just...I don’t know...something to share.”

Steve shook his head briefly and then took on a forthright tone, leveling his blue gaze to his friend. “In Central Park, not so far from the museum...there’s a sculpture honoring the 107th. I was there...my mother took me, for the unveiling a few years back. We were guests. I always visit it, before I head in. It’s easy to get to; easier than where Dad’s buried.”

Buck didn’t know exactly what to say, so he just offered Steve a furrowed brow of concern, letting the blond-haired boy have his thoughts.

Steve then leaned back and shrugged. “Well, if you want somewhere that feels a bit like the great outdoors, it’s Central Park.” The boy then gave a reedy sigh, such that Buck could faintly hear the whistle of his diminished lungs. “We’ll go together. Next Saturday, if you’re free.”

“Next Saturday’s just fine,” he agreed, trying to find some levity again. “I’ll dress smart for those Manhattan girls. Even if they stick to the walls and their chaperones tell me not to touch. Even if they are rather...well… _two-dimensional._ ”

A snort came out of the younger boy’s nose, surprised at the pun. He then started a fully-bellied laugh and Buck joined in, unable to stifle his own mirth at the notion of actually laying his hands on a canvas of a modeled Venus or three.

Buck decided that his thirteenth year wasn’t going to be that boring or that bad after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, there is actually a [memorial to the 107th Infantry](http://www.centralparknyc.org/things-to-see-and-do/attractions/107th-united-states-infantry.html) in Central Park, dedicated when Steve Rogers would have been eight or nine.
> 
> Also, a few BIG AO3 milestones for me with this update: 1000+ Kudos over 16 works. 20-some subscribed readers to my Authorship (which is basically getting notification to anything I write here.) I'm honored and humbled, dear readers. I hope to provide you with awesome MARVEL-related fics for months and months to come.


	27. Chapter 27

As predicted, Buck’s birthday celebration was of modest proportions, with just his family and Steve. Becca still seemed a little in awe of his new friend, as if he had been conjured by some strange form of patriotic magic.

His parents gave him a new pair of athletic shoes; the Reynolds gifted a Meccano erector set. Steve gave Buck an IOU of sorts to take him to one of the first week’s Robins’ games; on the cardstock of the promise note was a well-done ink sketch of a pitcher in motion. The biggest surprise came when Bucky’s mother brought out a last thin box, wrapped in brown paper and covered with postal stamps. His eyes flew quickly to the return address.

“It’s from the Gardners!” he exclaimed to the room, and saw a knowing-half smile on his father’s lips. 

Becca scrambled higher up on her chair to watch her brother unwrap it, her knees on the seat-cushion as she strained for a better vantage before Aunt Janet chided her to sit like a proper young lady. She sighed and sat back down, but she couldn’t keep her knees from bouncing up and down in anticipation for her brother.

Careful not to tear the stamps (some of the boys at school collected them), Bucky tugged at the folded edges of the wrapping until the tape gave way. The box itself was unremarkable, meant to protect rather than dazzle, and when the boy pried it open, he found a number of envelopes within. He sorted through them, briefly. One was labeled as ‘From Mr. Wiley Post’ in what he believed was Virginia Gardner’s handwriting. Another address on a smaller of the sealed notes simply spelled out ‘To Buck, From Lu.’ He’d read it later, privately. The last and largest had ‘From All of Us Out West.’

Buck held it up. “I assume this is the one I should open?” He then clarified for his blind father. “The one this says ‘From all of us out west’?”

“Yes, son,” George confirmed, “Go ahead.”

The boy took an unused knife from the table and slit open the envelope, pulling its contents open with a curiosity that creased his brow.

The card within it was ivory, printed with a blue inked bicycle, detailed like a technical drawing. Above the image was stamped the name of a specialty store in downtown Brooklyn. Inside, handwritten, was the script: _’To James Buchanan Barnes, redeemable for one new Columbia Arch-Bar Roadster, given on behalf of his friends in celebration of his thirteenth year.’_ All of the Gardner family, even Pearl, had signed it, along with many of his friends from Oklahoma, including Harry Matthews. He caught that even Mr. Post had given his hand to it.

The boy blinked and read it again. “Really?!” he asked, a bit of excitement in his gut and humbleness in his throat. 

“I’m sure the accessories will be extra, but you’ve been saving up for it. Right, James?” his mother asked. 

Bucky felt a wide smile come across his lips as he scanned the table. “I’ll write a thank-you note tomorrow. To everyone.” 

Steve met his eyes and gave a brief nod back, without hint of jealousy. “Looks like you’re not going to have to spend that nickel to speed over the bridge when you have a mind for it,” the blond observed. 

“At least in good weather,” was Buck’s reply. He doubted Steve had the lung-power to pedal far, but maybe he could convince the boy to catch a ride seated precariously on the handlebars or rear-wheel rack now and then. “When does it actually warm up here?” 

“Middle of April. Sometimes May,” Steve answered. “Not like Oklahoma?” 

Buck shook his head slightly, his mind thinking to Lucy and her favorite purple crocuses. “No. A few flowers are already up by now.” 

He tried not to miss the clean air, the prairies and foothills. The thought of pedaling up to the Gardner's house on his new roadster shouldn't be entertained. So he distracted himself. 

"Well," Buck asked. "How about another slice of cake?"

* * *

Steve was given the couch cushions again to sleep on the floor of Bucky’s room. The boy’s ankle was slowly mending, and he’d go to school the next morning. 

“You wanna hear what Mr. Post sent?” Buck asked, both the pilot’s and Lucy’s letters next to his bed. 

“Sure,” Steve agreed, continuing to sharpen his pencils with Bucky’s loaned pocket-knife. “That’s if you’re up for sharing.” 

Buck slipped the note out from it’s envelope. 

_”Dear James,”_ he read, pursing his lips slightly. It seemed that most adults took his father’s lead. _”Bill Gardner tells me that you’ve been scouting for some employment in that grand city of yours. Turns out that I have an acquaintance, Sherman Billingsley, by the way of the high-stakes card tables who decided to give New York his own go. He and a couple of partners set up this place on West 58th by the name of The Stork Club to cater to the café types and he’s looking for reliable staff. I told him about you and he’s willing to give you an interview for a busboy position, being a fellow Okie and all. Good luck, my boy, and my best to your parents and little sister. W. Post._

He looked up from the letter to Steve. ”’The Stork Club’. You ever hear of it?” 

“Yeah,” Steve acknowledged, his golden eyebrows coming closer together as his forehead furrowed. “It’s a speakeasy, of the fancy kind.” 

“Oh,” Buck sighed, feeling a bit of uncertainty. “I’ve been looking. I really have. This is the first lead of promise. I know it’s not...ideal.” The Barnes family needed this; he just loathed disappointing his friend. 

The other boy shrugged his narrow shoulders, not taking his gaze from his friend. “It’s hard times, Buck.” 

“I _have_ to give it a try, Steve. I know I’ll probably be lookin’ the other way on a lot of things. Becca’s growing like a weed now. And we’ll both have another sister or brother…” The emotion was thick in his voice now, and that shamed him even more. He turned his head to look down instead at his covered knees. 

“Hey,” Steve said, his hand resting now on the edge of Buck’s bed. “If you get it, I won’t think worse of you. You’re not me, and I’m not you. There’s opportunities you have...and responsibilities.” 

Buck just clenched his jaw, wishing that his responsibilities didn’t spit right in the face of his conscience. He didn’t want excuses, he wanted fairness and honesty to actually have reward in this world. 

“I’m sorry,” he breathed. “I’ll do my best to keep my head to the job and not be...distracted. Straight shootin’. That’s what my pop used to say to me. ‘Straight shootin.’” 

“Well, no one’s asking,” Steve offered, “But I’m saying that from what I’ve seen, no one has had much luck at all using force to stop folks from their small vices. Laws can’t do the same as a conviction within.” 

So whatever his friend thought of the prospect at the Stork, it wasn’t outright condemnation. Maybe tolerance, which was all Buck could hope for. He’d get his feet dirty if he needed, he decided, but he didn’t need to go hip-deep into temptations. By being a bit messy himself, he could give his sister and the baby-on-the-way their best chance at a better, purer life. He could even keep the fatherless boy that slept on his floor out of the mud of desperation. 

“I’m doing it, Steve,” Bucky then said with a steely resolve. He found the guts to look at the other boy again. “I’m doing it because there’s no one else who can.” 

“You’ll find your way,” Steve offered, smiling gently. He then fluffed his pillow, settling himself in. “I have faith in you, pal.” 

A knock at the door and his mother’s voice. “You both have school tomorrow, boys. Lights out! Happy Birthday, my dear.” 

“Goodnight, Mom!” Buck called. Then he offered to Steve, mischievously, as he turned off his bedside lamp. “Goodnight, da Vinci.” 

“Goodnight, bootlegger,” was Steve’s warm rebuttal in the dark. 


	28. Chapter 28

When Buck pedaled up to the address for The Stork Club one afternoon after school, he was uncertain he had the right place. It was a townhouse, much like his uncle’s own but twice as wide. There was no signs, the doors were solidly closed, but there were lights in the windows. Establishments like this didn’t put their name on the door. It was by word-of-mouth only, or chance, that one found them. Steve had informed him as much. He didn’t offer his relatives much information, only that Mr. Post had a lead for him on a busboy position at a restaurant in Midtown.

The boy took off his cap, tucked it in his coat, and ran a comb briefly through his dark hair. He did his best to ignore the flips in his stomach as he descended down to the basement entrance. Bucky had seen a few of Hollywood’s renditions of speakeasies, he wondered what was truth and what was simply movie glamour and magic.

He rapped his knuckles on the lacquered door and waited. Sure enough, there was a doorman, dressed in a fine suit, staring down at him. He was almost as big as Babe Ruth.

“Can I help you, boy?” 

Buck realized too late that he didn’t have any sort of password. So he just winged it. “I am here for an interview with Mr. Billingsley. Mr. Wiley Post sent me. From Oklahoma.”

The doorman cocked an eyebrow. “All that way?” he asked, his deep voice sounding half-incredulous and half colored with a quip.

“In a manner, sir,” he replied, looking down at his shoes, which he had shined himself before he bicycled from Brooklyn.

“Come in and wait by the hatcheck,” he was instructed, the door finally opened to admit him and then was closed immediately after. “Name?”

“James Buchanan Barnes,” the boy answered, walking behind the doorman. “Friends call me ‘Bucky’ though.”

“I’ll let the boss know you’ve come.” The doorman shouted into the maze of carpeted rooms festooned with dining tables, “Clarence?! Watch the door…!” He then disappeared.

Not so far into the club was an opening in the wall with a countertop where two pretty young women in a uniform of sorts loitered in a narrow room filled with hangers and cubbies. The hatcheck. It was the mid-afternoon, between luncheon and supper. The place was deserted, and the two stopped whatever gossip and chit-chat they were engaged in order to eye the new arrival.

“You want to leave your coat with us?” a platinum blonde nearish to eighteen offered, as her fingers swept the polished oak in lazy practice. She then elbowed the other attendant and voiced, conspiratorily, “They’re starting in the business so _early_ , these days.”

“I’m here for an interview, ma’am,” Bucky clarified. Something he said must have amused them, for they tittered. “To be a busboy.”

“Well, Mr. Manners,” the brunette said, matter-of-factly. “Give over your coat and we won’t hold it for ransom when you come back for it.”

So Buck peeled off his outer layer, sliding it to them with a ‘thank you’. Even if the two women thought he was quaint, he wasn’t about to take for granted small kindnesses.

He tried not to fidget and not to appear overly-curious as he waited another minute; he kept himself from craning his neck too much around the corridors and spaces. If he got the job, the tour would come soon enough.

A glance back towards the hatcheck had the blonde batting her mascaraed eyelashes at him. Such flirtations no longer flustered him, thanks to Caroline, and cooly, he winked at her without moving his chin. That had her blinking in a different way, but Buck determined he was going to be more composed than his age advertised. He was aware then of the two whispering with surprise and excitement. A bit of mystery was valuable in matters of attraction, that much he knew.

From out of the decadence of the club, the doorman appeared in the entranceway again. “The boss will see you now. Follow me.”

“Good luck, little sheik!” the two hatcheck girls called to his back in unison, lilting and playful, as if they had planned it; as if they were rehearsing for some Broadway scene.

Buck just followed in the footsteps of the imposing doorman. The rooms and their appointments had the luxury of the Gardner’s home and better. It was a brief glance at the expansive bar that caused the boy to pause briefly in his journey. Bottles upon bottles of varied liquors were displayed proudly, _brazenly_ along the shelves behind a warmly-lit bar. He had to keep his chin from dropping, his feet from sticking to the floor.

The winding steps lead up to the top floor, the proprietor’s office. He could already smell the pungent, spicy scent of tobacco smoke.

“There. End of the hall, kid,” the doorman gestured. “I’d say ‘good luck’, but it seems Ruthie and Alice went out of their way to pile it on.”

The boy found himself reach for his hat again, realizing a moment too late that his cap was downstairs with his coat. So with his raised hand, he knocked briefly on the half-opened door.

“Come!” was an authoritative order.

Buck slipped in. The boss, Mr. Sherman Billingsley, was sitting in a tall upholstered chair, half-turned to look out the narrow windows and down to the street below. Smoke curled up from one of his hands, a lit cigar fingered there. The man was in his mid-thirties, a contemporary of his father, Buck thought. And he looked a bit like his father (before the artillery accident), with dark hair and blue eyes. Maybe it wasn’t lost on Billingsley that Buck looked a lot like him, too.

“Sir, I’ve come about a busboy job.” God, Bucky wished he sounded more confident. “l’m a young friend of Mr. Post...the pilot, back in Oklahoma. We knew each other through Lieutenant Gardner. He and my pop were stationed at Fort Sill.”

“Well, sit down, m’boy, and let’s chat.” Billingsley rose and walked to his desk, snubbed his cigar in a black and white ceramic ashtray. There was a glass decanter there of a beautiful amber liquid. “Whiskey?” the club-owner asked, pouring a glass half-full. It was single glass; the man did not reach for a second. Instead, he waved the crystal within Buck’s reach.

As Buck squirmed once in the leather-cushioned seat, a flash of Steve’s chess lessons came back to the boy. Of how a temptation of a lesser piece was dangled to an opponent to be captured, but it was a trick. Something to throw the competitor off a better position. It should be refused, even if his mouth watered slightly at the notion of his first buzz since last Christmas.

“No, thank you, Mr. Billingsley. I’m here for a job, not a drink,” the boy answered, with all the no-nonsense, straight-forward talk that he imagined his blond friend would give.

“Well, well!” The man chuckled, then claimed a deep swallow of the drink himself.

The manner of the boss’ gaze, a small twitch of the corner of his eyes, convinced Buck he had made the right choice. The man settled behind his desk.

“It’s a dollar wage a day for busboys, nine hour shifts. Plus whatever tips get shared from the waiters or a guest gives you outright.” Billingsley explained. “You still in school?”

“Yes, sir. My father and I agreed for me to get my diploma,” he responded. A dollar-a-day was more than he had ever earned before, with the little neighborhood chores and jobs-for-hire he had back out west going for less.

The man’s left index finger tapped on the desk a couple of times, as he studied Bucky further. “I have three rules in this house for my staff. _My_ house.”

Buck leaned closer, the finest of his facial features molded in seriousness. He tried to look older, more mature.

Another bit of the golden liquid disappeared, tipped away. “Rule one. I will not tolerate theft. Cash. Booze. A cigarette. Anything. This place will go from a sieve to a sewer pipe if everyone in my employ tipples from the bar or dips their fingers into a lady’s purse. My man at the front has a good feeling about you, James, but I’m telling you upfront and only once that you’ll not only lose your job if you’re caught, anyone suspected will be on the hook for whatever went missin’.”

The danger was a threat, but it was also a bit of a thrill. Being on the ‘hook’ in this business didn’t mean necessarily getting ratted out to the cops for some jail-time. It could mean much more sinister things. It all depended on who Billingsley owed and who owed him. Buck had, if he was ever to survive in this underground, to shoot straight.

“I’m not a thief, sir,” he confirmed. Bucky prayed he sounded sincere.

“Of course not, kid.” The final dregs of the whiskey slid with ease from the glass down the man’s throat. “Second rule. Our guests are always in the right. It’s my way to forgive a ten dollar tab at the bar for the right person and have him bring four paying friends back another night. Same with the women. Your job is to please them. Times are hard and places like this...well, sometimes it’s the only fantasy people have left. You question that philosophy, you talk to the head waiter. Got it?”

Buck nodded. “The third rule?” he inquired.

“The help doesn’t fraternize with the guests. You’re the waitstaff, not the entertainment.” The man fixed his eyes on his prospective. “Whomever you see come through those doors, sit at the tables, order champagne or a scotch neat, you keep it to yourself. Herbert Hoover himself wants a plate cleared, you don’t gossip about it. Not to your family. Not to your best friend. You’ll be sacked for even requesting an autograph.”

So many requirements. But they didn’t seem too extreme. It’s not like Buck was being asked to deliver a case of gin down to Brooklyn.

“Understandable, sir,” the boy agreed, his heartbeat finally easing to normal.

The slick-haired proprietor chuckled again. “Military boy, through-and-through, aren’t ya? Wish to God we all had such a clean start.” The sweetness of the western drawl came to the fore then, familiar and warm. “Well, Jimmy-boy! Show up this Friday at four o’clock and this Saturday at ten in the morning, and I think you can name yourself an Em-Ploy-Ee. Don’t know how long this captain can keep the ship afloat, but as long as she’s seaworthy and you tow the line, you’ve a place on deck.”

Bucky allowed himself a smile then. “Thank you, Mr. Billingsley!” He rose from his seat, and the man his, reaching over the desk to shake Buck’s hand. He gave a firm squeeze, as his father had instructed. 

The boy didn’t need to be told that he was dismissed, and he made his way to the door. Still he stole one glance at the room again, to find Billingsley staring through the windows and down at the too-quiet entrance to his club again. The man sighed forlornly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My giving Bucky Barnes Oklahoman ties is continuing to pay off!
> 
> A fun fact with this chapter:  
> [The Stork Club](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stork_Club) didn't become a success until 1931, and it was pretty much a few miracles that kept it afloat in those early years.
> 
> I couldn't help but delight in the idea that Buck once was a busboy in the place that, more than ten years later, Steve and Peggy were to have their 'first date'.


End file.
